


the house we never owned

by Edoro



Series: the universe is shaped exactly like the earth [2]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Domestic Fluff, Domestic Gay Homesteading Interlude, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Major Character Undeath (Miraculous Survival Style), Masturbation, Oral Sex, Plot With Porn, Prostate Massage, Strap-Ons, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-11-19 08:47:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18133547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Ka's wheel turns. The Turtle sings. All things serve the fuckin' Beams.(On another level of the Tower, things go a little differently. While Roland holds his long palaver with the man in black, the stray members of his ka-tet settle in to await his return.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the second installment of Dark Tower Redux! Here we follow Cuthbert and Alain as they cross the Mohaine Desert, climb the mountains, and make it to the great Western Sea... only to discover that Roland is nowhere to be found. I hope you're all ready for some good wholesome Al/Bert times, because that is what we've got here, along with a couple generous helpings of distinctly naughty times as well.

(And of Roland, well, we know what happened next. He journeyed across the desert, following the trail of the man in black, catching up by slow inches. Between the scorching mirrors of hardpan and sky he was caught and held and baked dry, until all memory of love and light and better times were gone from him.

He came upon a waystation and there he found a boy and a speaking demon. From that place he took a friend and a jawbone. He told the boy stories of his long gone childhood and of the friends who - he had become very sure, during his trek, were dead and dry by then - he had once traveled with.

They traveled far, up a mountain and under it, and there Roland was faced with a choice: the boy or his vengeance. 

He had been faced with many such choices during his long life, and he chose as he had chosen all those many times, and let the boy fall. And beyond the dark underbelly of the mountain, he met finally with his ancient quarry. They had long palaver, those two.

This story we know, and so we’ll turn our eyes to the story we do not, of the gunslinger’s companions.)

\---

They walked. The desert rolled endlessly out before them and to all sides, a featureless hard-baked waste of rubble and blowing grit. For a time, there was no sound save the whisper and crunch of the ground beneath their well-worn old boots.

Even though he didn’t speak, Cuthbert’s irritation and outrage roiled off of him, his own personal heat shimmer.

Alain put a hand to his back, just briefly. It was too hot for much more. “Don’t be angry with him, Bert. He’s only doing as he sees best.”

“As he sees  _ best _ ?” Cuthbert cried indignantly. He blew a raspberry. “That to his sight and to his best - he’s sent us off like a couple of untried boys, so we don’t slow him.”

“He’s sent  _ me _ off so I don’t slow him down,” Alain said mildly.

“And does that not offend you?”

“Why should it?” Alain asked with a shrug. “‘Tis true enough. I slow the both of you down, and were we to lose the man in black in this desert, we might wander the rest of our lives and not find him again. Roland ought to have sent all three of us apart, so we might catch him up no matter which way he went, but the two of you insist on nursemaiding me.” Sharpness crept into his voice, in spite of himself.

It was tiredness more than anger, truth be told. How many decades had passed since that awful night before the battle that had ended them, Alain could not rightly guess, for time did not flow steadily as it once had. Still, it was many and many-a. And yet they still all seemed trapped in the shadow of it, his two companions most of all. 

“No one’s  _ nursemaiding _ you, Al,” protested Cuthbert. “It’s just -”

“It’s just that you think me unable to make it on my own.” Unconsciously echoing Roland’s earlier thought - or perhaps subconsciously, for there were few thoughts his ka-mates had that Alain was unaware of - he added, a little waspishly, “Despite the fact that of all of us, I am most suited to this task. You and Roland cannot let go of your guilt, though, so -”

“Were we not taught that if you would pull your irons and fire, you own the consequences of that decision? And that’s when speaking of an  _ enemy _ , so how much more true must it be when one fires upon a friend?” Cuthbert stopped still and spoke with quiet intensity, staring with a troubled eye into Alain’s face.

“How long do you plan to wear Jericho Hill like a stone around your neck, Bert? Why do you and Roland bear it so much more heavily than I?” 

“How is it that you can put it so easily behind you?” Cuthbert countered. And then, at last, the question neither he nor Roland had been able to ask, for all that it had burned inside them all this long time: “How do you not blame us?”

Alain shrugged. “What use is’t, to speak of blame? No man can change the past. All three of us made foolish mistakes to end up in such a situation. By all rights, I should have died. The two of you fired how many bullets at me? Ten, twenty, more? And you dug four slugs out of me after the shooting was done. And yet I lived, lamed but still whole enough to bear my guns.” He laid a finger on his left cheek, at the corner of his eye. “I aim better than you, and never ‘twas my body the greatest of my weapons. So speak not of blame and pity me not. Call it luck or ka or some warning tickle from the touch sent me diving from my saddle just as the two of you opened fire and kept me from a mortal wound, but I haven’t stepped into the clearing yet.”

Alain couldn’t recall a time in recent memory he’d spoken so much in one go. Such was more in Cuthbert’s nature. Quicksilver-tongued Bert would no doubt have made a prettier job of it too. 

He swallowed, trying to wet his dry throat, waiting for Cuthbert to speak. The wind sighed listlessly between them, stirring ankle-high clouds of dust.

Slowly, Cuthbert sank to his knees, and put his curled fist to his forehead. “I cry your pardon, gunslinger. I have forgotten the face of my fa- “

“Oh, no, Bert,” Alain groaned in dismay. He dropped his stick to the ground and lurched forwards to grab Cuthbert under the arms and lift him back onto his feet. “You needn’t cry my pardon, though you have it, and you haven’t forgotten anyone’s face. I don’t want any of that, Bert, I just want you to let it  _ go _ .”

“Alright,” Cuthbert agreed after a moment. He gently stepped back from Alain’s grip on him and made a show of adjusting his shirt. “Alright, you have my word on that. From now on I won’t spare it a thought.”

That was a lie, Alain suspected, but perhaps if he let it alone long enough it might become the truth. He could feel a sort of sore relief bubbling away at the top of Cuthbert’s mind, like the healing pain of finally having drained an infected wound.

They walked a time longer in reflective silence, and then Cuthbert spoke, his tone one of innocent inquiry. “So, when does Roland get such a speech?”

“Roland,” Alain said severely, “is my dinh, and his decision was correct even if I don’t agree with his reasoning.  _ You _ are simply -”

“Your witty, charming, and beloved lifemate, to whom you vowed love and loyalty before both our fathers and all the assembled gentry of Gilead?” 

“- my man,” Alain finished drily, “and my friend. Same gist, I suppose. I do believe that means I’m bound to tell you when you’re being a fool, and need not mince words about it.”

“‘Tis one duty I never need worry you’ll forget.” Cuthbert heaved a dolorous sigh, but the laughter was back in his voice. Still a little tentative, but there. “I don’t call it fair, though, having to compete with the last of the line of Eld. You’re a wicked man, Alain Johns, who bought my heart with trickery and lies, only to set me in opposition to my own best bosom friend -”

“Oh, do shut up. What are you even talking about?” Nothing, which was a specialty of Bert’s. No one Alain had ever met could speak as long on nothing at all as Cuthbert Allgood. 

To hear such foolery again as they resumed their journey did cheer Alain, though. The wheels and wheels of desert ahead would test them sore enough without bad spirits between them.

“Be on the lookout for some shelter,” Alain advised. “I’d like us to stop and sleep the day away and walk by night.”

“Oh, aye, a famous idea, stumbling around this barren place under cover of darkness, and me all but blind as well, as you yourself so recently noted! Should I step in a hole and snap my ankle, don’t let me suffer, alright? I’ll have your word on it. Give me a clean shot to the head, though try to spare my face, as I’d like to die handsome as I lived.”

With the practiced patience of long years, Alain ignored Bert’s words and spoke to his meaning. “We’ll have the stars and moon to see by, and if it’s cloudy, I know our way. We’re three or four days’ travel from an oasis.”

Cuthbert turned his head, birdlike, to dart a look at Alain from his remaining eye. “There’s water in this dry place? Truly? How can you tell?”

“Of everything you’ve seen me do, it’s dowsing that you can’t believe?” Alain fluttered an open hand towards the shimmering horizon. “I can feel the things growing around the water. How much or how good it is, I can’t say, but more than none and clean enough to drink.”

\---

By night the desert could almost be a beautiful place. There was a harsh sort of artistry to the random arrangements of rock and shadow under the vault of the night sky. The moon rose and shone down its cold radiance, painting the ground silver.

The gunslingers rose with it, somewhat stiffly in Alain’s case - the cold worked itself into his bones, but it was a  _ dry _ cold and not so bad as it could have been, say thankya - and were on their way.

\---

They reached the first oasis just when Alain said they would, on the morning of their fourth day night of travel. 

No doubt Alain knew long before Cuthbert did, but he didn’t need to be told. He spied the difference in the land as they came near: the relative abundance of plants, not just devilweed but stubby stubborn desert grass and low, waxy-leafed shrubs, and a certain depth of color to to thin soil. 

Perhaps an hour or two out he could even smell the water in the air. He’d grown so used to the dry dust scent of the desert that the sudden wet scent of water seemed almost out of place.

Finally they crested a low hill and saw it, lying nestled in a depression between one hill and the next, ringed around with grass and even a handful of stunted, gnarled trees.

“Just as you said, my friend,” Cuthbert said, clapping Alain on the shoulder. “An unlikely jewel to find in such a setting, but lovely all the same.”

“Did you doubt it would be?” Alain asked, but did not wait for the answer. 

He went carefully down the gentle slope, probing ahead with his walking stick to test the firmness of the soil. Gentle it might have been, but treacherously unstable at times. The other night he’d stumbled as the soil let loose under his heel and would have spilled himself ass over heels down the hill had Cuthbert not grabbed him in time, stick or no.

“We’ll rest here for the day,” he said, and lowered himself carefully to sit on a stone near the grassy ring of the oasis, his stick across his knees.

Normally they would travel into the late hours of the morning. The sun hadn’t yet peeked over the horizon, though there was a greyish quality to the darkness that said it soon would.

Cuthbert didn’t object, though, not at all. He dropped onto the ground beside Alain and leaned his head against his good leg, eye sliding closed with pleasure when Alain reached down and wound his fingers into his hair.

“Better accommodations than we’ve seen so far, I’ve no doubt. Think you there’s enough water to scrub off some of this dust? I don’t like to think of how ripe I am right now.” At the least, he could wipe off his face and hands.

Alain grunted noncommittally. “Might be. Be sure you fill our skins first, though.”

The pool of water was muddy and had a flat, alkali taste. Cuthbert filled their empty skins gladly anyway - so many empty already, even when they avoided the hottest parts of the day - and then rolled his pants up to wade out into the middle.

It came up just past his knees. That was enough for a rinse, he reckoned, if not much of a soak. He didn’t fancy squatting down in it anyway, not with how murky the water was and its stagnant mineral smell.

He splashed back out to divest himself of clothes and boots. The boots he stood in the sun beside Alain’s rock, while he hung his clothes over the branches of a tree at the edge of the water.

Cool mud squished between his bare toes as he strode back out into the middle of the pool. Dumping the water over his head felt divine. It was lukewarm still and the morning air cool but no longer cold. The caked dust and sweat of the last few days sluiced away, leaving him feeling light and refreshed. 

“You ought to come join me,” he called over his shoulder to Alain, working his fingers into his wet hair and scratching blissfully at his gritty scalp.

“I think I’ll simply watch from here, do it please ya,” Alain called back. His tone was light, but there was an underlying tightness to it that Cuthbert knew well.

“You stink, dearheart! I have to stay upwind of you to keep from choking! Come sit at the side of the pool and I’ll wash you, how about it?” Turning to glance at Alain, who was rubbing his thigh just above his knee with a grimace, he added, “I’ll rub you down with your horse liniment too, how does that sound?”

Sleeping rough was always hard on Alain, but the terrain of the desert, Cuthbert knew, made it worse. Rather than staying flat, the ground buckled and rolled into hills, none particularly steep but all a special trial for Alain to climb up and down.

“What’s the point?” Alain asked. “I’ll stink again in a day anyway.” But after a moment he rose, stiffly and with a long groan, and stumped over to the edge of the pool. 

There was no shortage of stones protruding from the ground, at least, for him to sit upon. He stripped off his shirt and shoes and dipped his feet into the water with a relieved sigh.

“You see,” Cuthbert said triumphantly, standing before him dripping with his hands on his hips, “it feels good, doesn’t it?”

There was a moment, as there always was, where Alain looked him up and down. Not with any desire, but simply the fondly possessive look of long familiarity with the body in front of him. As always, a hot, pleased little shiver worked its way down Cuthbert’s spine to the pit of his belly at that look. No look of open lust had ever made him feel so handsome as that casual wander of Alain’s gaze over him.

“Feels good to dip my feet, aye. To stand around wet and naked ‘til I’m dry enough to dress, for fear of wiping gravel out of my ass for the next week?” Alain wrinkled his nose in an expressive grimace. “That experience I leave to you, Bert.”

“I’ll savor it for you,” Cuthbert promised solemnly.

He went to his knees, wrung the rag he’d used to clean himself with dry - the water that ran out was terribly dingy - and went to work. He took as much simple, uncomplicated pleasure in touching Alain as he did in cleaning himself off.

Which wasn’t to say he didn’t take the opportunity to touch as much as he could, nor take a baser sort of pleasure from the contrast between the soft skin and coarse hair beneath his hands.

Once he’d washed Alain’s back clean, he set his rag aside but didn’t get up. Instead he put his hands on Alain’s shoulders, admiring as always the strength in their wide span, and began to rub. Slowly the tension melted from Alain; he sighed and slumped forward, chin tilting down onto his chest. Cuthbert could easily imagine his slack, pleased face and closed eyes.

Cuthbert couldn’t resist leaning in to kiss the sun-reddened back of Alain’s neck. Met with another encouraging sigh, he did it again, and then trailed soft kisses along the span of one shoulder.

He hooked his chin over Alain’s shoulder and nosed at the corner of his jaw, breathing in the smell of him. In spite of his earlier complaining, the strong scent of Alain’s body - even with the faint but present undertone of sweat, both the honest sweat of a day’s walking and the sour note of pain-sweat - unknotted something in his chest in the same way that once the smell of his parents’ sheets had when he’d climbed into bed between them after a childish nightmare.  _ Safe now _ , that scent told him.

His hands slid from Alain’s shoulders around to the front of his body. One came to rest low on the curve of his belly, while the other went to his chest to cup one of his breasts, so satisfyingly weighty and solid. Idly, almost without realizing he was doing it, Cuthbert began rubbing the ball of his thumb back and forth across the nipple.

“Cuthbert,” Alain murmured warningly, though he also leaned back against him.

Cuthbert pressed in closer, his chest against Alain’s back so he could feel the deep, rhythmic whoosh of his breath and feel the steady thumping of his heart. “I just want to touch you, that’s all.”

Though he didn’t know it, he shared Roland’s anxieties about the trip ahead. He felt in a powerful and wordless way that this trip would in some way be the end of them, and assumed it meant they wouldn’t meet again beyond the desert. It was Roland he feared for, Roland who had strode out alone into the oven of the desert’s very heart after their quarry.

The simple fact of Alain’s body beneath his hands, pressed against him, alive and warm and breathing, soothed down that terrible gripping grief-feeling.

After a moment, Alain put a hand over his. “He’ll be alright, Bert,” he said quietly. “That man will outlive the both of us, I’m sure.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that,” Cuthbert said. “That only makes me worry more, for what shall he do without us there to keep him on the path?”

They stayed like that for a time longer, until the water had dried off both of them and the sun leered over the horizon, heating the air. Then Cuthbert broke away to fetch the liniment as he had promised, and rub the stuff into Alain from hip to knee, in hopes of easing his pain.


	2. Chapter 2

Concepts such as direction had become as elastic as time in these late days. The sun rose and set each day still - and how long might it be until even that was no longer true? - but the start and end points of its arc across the sky drifted vaguely around; it might rise due east only to set south of true west, or wallow about so that it lay to one side rather than in the middle of the sky at noon. 

Compasses were no more accurate than timepieces. Navigation was reckoned mostly by landmarks, of which the desert had precious few. 

Cuthbert could not in truth have said that he knew Alain led them in one fixed direction. Certainly he walked confidently ahead, pausing from time to time to close his eyes and then resume moving, or to gently correct their course, but for all Cuthbert knew, they were going in circles. 

Travelling at night kept them cool and saved them water, but it also made the whole desert feel like some sort of dream ribbon unrolling under his feet without beginning or end. The endless rolling hills and featurelessly identical scrub weeds and hardpan defeated any attempt to fix their route in his mind.

And when the sun finally rose behind them and color leached back into the world, that was when they sought out the meager shelter of some overhang or cleft in a hill and slept through the worst of the day.

Cuthbert drowsed uneasily during those days, smothered beneath the oppressive, breathless heat. Often he dreamed disjointed dreams of walking by himself through the eternal desert. Sometimes he was looking for Alain or Roland, but sometimes he was simply, terribly alone. From these dreams he woke sweat-sticky and disoriented, unsure for a time if he were now awake, or if the dream were reality and he was now dreaming.

Gradually the distance between oases grew. The first three were each a few days apart, strung out like beads on a wire, but then the next one took them almost a week to reach, and after that, Cuthbert lost count of the days.

He tried to keep up a patter of conversation, if only to keep away his own megrims. Alain responded often enough at first, but less and less as they went on. He seemed to sink into himself, or perhaps out of himself. Such was not wholly unusual; sometimes he would look out ahead from his mind’s eye, to see what he might see, and sometimes he simply fell deep into the pattern of his own thoughts. Cuthbert didn’t worry overmuch about it, at first.

Then came the day Alain tripped over a rock in his way, not concealed in the least. He went over like a sack full of stones, visibly wrenching his bad knee in the process, and the look of open bewilderment on his face as he groped about for his walking stick and tried to sit up chilled Cuthbert to the bone. He couldn’t even do that much, at first, for no sooner had he started to sit than a monstrous cramp seized his bad leg, curling him over it and turning the big muscle in his thigh hard as iron. Cuthbert sat beside him and helped to knead it loose, but it took half an hour at the least before he could stand again.

He could not say where his mind had been, that he hadn’t even noticed the ground in front of himself. Cuthbert tried to keep him present after that, but it wasn’t long after they’d gotten going again that he started to drift, and no amount of hinting or outright asking or sharpness from Cuthbert could keep him back in himself for long.

From then on Cuthbert walked close beside him, with an arm slipped through his if he could or a guiding hand on his shoulder. More than once it saved him from another tumble.

When the grey haze of the mountains began to grow on the horizon, Cuthbert’s weary heart lifted at the sight. Whatever strange malaise had grabbed hold of Alain’s mind, they would surely leave it behind when they left the desert.

\---

A landscape was a living thing, a sort of biological quilt stitched together of the hundreds and thousands of threads of life inhabiting it.

Alain had felt such a thing before. Had he not, in the long-gone years of his boyhood, been shown to feel for even the dim collective consciousness of a field of grass? Yes, he had. Vannay had shown him that trick, brilliant limping Vannay who’d had a touch of the touch, whose brilliant sickly son had possessed more than that. 

He’d taken the two of them out to the lawn where the court ladies played Points in the summer evenings and sat them down - barely more than toddlers, the two of them - and told them not to think but simply to  _ feel _ . Wallace had gotten it first. Once he did he showed Alain, and ever after Alain had been fascinated with that feeling of so many tiny things, alive but mindless, joined together so many strong they felt like an animal, only one that stretched out all around you.

He’d felt such a thing in forests, especially old ones. Trees of a certain age felt more to him like sleeping people than plants. He’d felt it out in farmland, the collective lifesong of all the crops and all the herds singing out together. 

And he felt it now, in the desert. The longer they traveled, the more he felt the desert as a force so strong it was almost alive. There was life there, tiny scurrying things that dug in the dunes and carrion birds that flew in the sky above, but that wasn’t quite what he felt.

It was the desert itself, so vast and so geologically ancient that it had achieved a kind of life, a magnetic sort of pull.

Alain let his mind go and rise far above his tired, aching body, and looked down on the bowl of the desert. He saw the tiny trekking forms of himself and Cuthbert, and much farther away of Roland. He saw the hidden buried buildings that no human would ever lay eyes on again, lost relics of the Old People. He saw the man in black, and felt him as well, a presence that overpowered the vastness of the desert, but blinked curiously out of and then back into his awareness, like a glow-light being flicked on and off, off and on.

Enough of himself stayed behind to keep his body walking and breathing. He trusted Cuthbert to keep him from any real harm. The rest of him rose on the updrafts and watched the shift of wind and grit and the shimmer of heat in the dry still places where not even spiders lived anymore.

He’d dreamed of Wallace’s death, he remembered. Not all who had the touch received portents, but Alain did. He’d been too young to understand or explain it, but he’d dreamed of Wallace in the kitchen sitting on the counter and tipping forward, falling, and bursting open like an egg he’d seen dropped once and splattering everywhere.

Years before Wallace’s death that had been, and by the time it came he’d forgotten about the dream. By then it wouldn’t have done anyone any good anyway.

“I told him to stay out of the kitchen,” Alain mumbled, unaware he was doing so. “Told him not to go there, but ‘twasn’t there that his death was, no, ‘twas in his own head…”

Cuthbert, who had put up gamely with much over the last week or so, had had enough. He grabbed Alain by the shoulders and shook him until the glazed, absent look left his eyes and the terrible bewildered one came back.

“What did you say?” he asked, staring intently down into Alain’s face. “You told who? Whose death?”

At first Cuthbert’s words were only meaningless noise. Alain gazed in helpless confusion up at the fine-featured face in front of him, scrabbling for who that was and where he was. 

“Wallace,” he blurted. 

“What?” Cuthbert frowned. “Who is Wallace?”

“I…” Alain scrubbed a hand down his face. Awareness trickled slowly in, but the thought he’d just been having receded back upwards. “I don’t know. Did I speak?”

“Aye, of death - I was afraid you’d had some vision of Roland.” Cuthbert let him go and stepped back. Alain missed his steadying touch. “Do you mean Vannay’s son Wallace? Our old playmate?”

That rang familiar enough. “Mayhap I do. I was thinking of him, I think…” Alain tried to reach out to Roland, as he had done before he’d begun to drift, but felt only darkness. That troubled him, but not over much. It wasn’t death or undue peril, simply darkness.

With genuine curiosity, now that he was assured Alain hadn’t sensed a danger to their absent dinh, Cuthbert asked, “Did you dream Wallace’s death? I didn’t know you started having premonitions so early.”

“I suspect they began as soon as I started dreaming,” Alain said, almost absently. He was looking around, and the look of the landscape disturbed him. They were in the foothills now. The mountains reared above them, clawing at the sky. Green had crept back into the world, and the air once more had the wet smell of nearby water they’d both taken for granted once, on the other edge of the desert.

“Bert… How long have we been walking?”

\---

They stopped that night to rest among the comparatively lush greenery of the foothills, before the trial of the mountain. It would be some time yet before they’d need to truly climb, but the time for traveling in the dark was past, and the both of them could use a time to simply sit and shed the weight of the desert off their shoulders.

Alain laid the fire, glad to burn clean grass rather than devilweed. Even up here where water trickled down, the weed was more common, but he didn’t fancy the ill dreams its smoke brought on. Those were bad enough even if one was touchblind, worse if one wasn’t.

Mindful of the difficulty ahead, he arranged the grass into a good-luck sign. Had Cuthbert been present, he might have had a jest about it - for Cuthbert had his own superstitious fancies, to be sure, but never missed an opportunity for irreverence if he could help it - but he’d gone stalking off into the evening gloom after dinner.

Once the fire was going steadily, Alain got up to fetch water. He found a trickle of runoff coming down an exposed jut of rock in the hillside, still shockingly cold from its origin high up the mountain’s side.

Presently Cuthbert came padding back, emerging out of the growing darkness into the circle of firelight dangling a hare by its back legs.  “An owl went after this skinny fellow after I flushed him,” he said cheerfully, “but in the end I stood him down. I wouldn’t have liked to fight him for it, truth be told. Those wicked talons, you know - could have easily lost another eye, and then what good would I be? Why, I’d barely shoot straighter than you then.”

“‘Twould be a tragedy for sure,” Alain agreed. Scrawny the hare might have been, and surely its meat would be tough and rangy, but just the thought of fresh meat after the long dry trip through the desert made his mouth water.

With quick and practiced skill, Cuthbert had the rabbit out of its skin and ready to cook. They rigged it up on a rough spit over their little fire and sat back to let it roast.

“So are you back among us mortals, now?” Cuthbert asked. His tone might have been casual, but Alain knew him too well not to hear the concern underneath.

“I’m fine, and not like to drift away like that again. It was…” He ran a hand back through his hair, trying to put the sensation into words Bert could understand. “The desert was so large and so much the same. I tranced myself, you could say, though I didn’t realize, and once I had…” He shrugged and fluttered a hand dismissively. Though he tried to put a casual tone to his words, in truth the episode had frightened him. Not since he was a small boy still learning to control his abilities had he lost himself in such a way, and were it not for Cuthbert, he might not have found his way back.

“You had best not, for I’ll not be responsible if you walk yourself off a cliff.” Cuthbert did not seem entirely eased by that explanation, but it was the best Alain could give him.

“And how shall we be crossing, for that matter?” Cuthbert asked after a moment’s pause. “For I hope you take no offense, but I don’t think a man in your condition has much business climbing mountains, and I shan’t be giving you a pig-back ride up. Ought we perhaps continue north and seek a way around, or some gentler slopes?”

Alain cast a considering eye towards the peaks above them. From his former vantage point in the sky, they’d seemed eminently crossable, but of course, as a man walked and as the crow flew were two very different ways.

He looked inward as well, to that sense of what the path of ka might be, and to what portents might have come to him during their crossing.  In his purse was a small bag of cunningly carved seeing bones and a well-worn pack of divining cards. He’d carved the bones and cut and painted the cards himself, so they were well-attuned to him, and each had served often as a focus for such questions, but this time he reached for neither.

This time the answer came to him easily.

“I think we’ve come to as good a place as any,” he said slowly. “Might be there’s easier crossing farther on, but far out of our way. We’ve come to a gentler place than I think Roland has or will.”

“What of Roland? Can you touch him?” 

“I did see him, for a time.” Alain closed his eyes and reached for Roland’s mind, as familiar to his as a pair of well-worn boots. “He’s alive, but much more than that I can’t tell you. There may be someone else with him. It’s dark.”

“Dark?” Cuthbert echoed. “What does that mean? Sounds foreboding. And who is this with him? Not our man, is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just dark.” How to communicate the sense of total, smothering lightlessness he got when he reached for Roland? Impossible. “I don’t feel he’s in any particular danger from it. I don’t think it’s the man, although…” That mind was easy to feel, old and vast and strange as it was. “He is very close.”

“It feels queer, being so far from him,” Cuthbert muttered, tossing a pebble so it went clattering down the hill they sat atop. “I suppose we’ll get across and find Roland waiting, having bagged our man neat as a hare in a snare, and he’ll ask what took us so long.”

“We should hope so.” Privately, Alain didn’t believe that would happen anymore than Cuthbert did. He didn’t sense  _ danger _ to Roland, exactly - danger around him, aye, but he was a gunslinger and he carried danger in his heart and death strapped to his hips wherever he went, did’ee not? - but something momentous and difficult in his dinh’s path, that he did sense.

Trouble, as Roland was fond of saying, and in his road.

Whatever it was, he had thrown himself and the men of his tet onto their own separate paths, and he would have to face it alone.

\---

_ it’s dark, so dark, and there’s nothing but endless empty open air beneath his dangling feet and his clutching hands are slipping and it is so dark but when he looks up he sees Roland’s face swim out of the darkness above him, Roland’s haggard tired face and cold blue eyes in the grey non-light of this empty dead (dark) place, Roland who is his dinh and his friend and his lover, Roland whose hands he has already nearly died at once and whose word he knows he will die at and when? sometime soon, he thinks - _

_ \- but not now, right now Roland can save him and he reaches up with one helpless pleading hand even as he knows Roland isn’t going to, Roland is going to pass him by and let him fall into the darkness - _

_ “go then,” he says, although they are not his words and it is not his voice, “there are other worlds than these.” _

_ and he falls and he falls and it is dark and he falls and there is nothing but the emptiness and the darkness and he begins to believe that he may fall forever, that he is only a mind in some lonely dark place and there will be no mortal death to free him, no sudden stop _

_ and he falls _

_ and - _

\---

Alain lurched awake with a gasp, sitting bolt upright. Fear clutched at him, stilling his breath in his throat and making his heart rattle around in the cage of his ribs. With the fear came a sense of some great pain, though both receded quickly. In their wake he felt a grief so powerful he nearly wept, knowing not what for.

That, too, bled away from him. It took longer, though. When it was gone he still felt queerly empty and alone.

The moon rode high in the sky above, cold and white. The stars glittered like frost in the black blanket of the sky, and Alain felt - as he often did when he looked up at the curving vault of the night sky - small and brief. Not in the usual awestruck way then, though, but as if the very smallness of his own life meant it meant nothing.

He lay back down and drew Cuthbert to him. Being so moved woke him; he rolled blearily into Alain’s embrace, tucking his face into Alain’s chest and draping a loose arm over him, and was just as soon asleep again.

Alain stayed awake for a long time, running his fingers through Cuthbert’s fine hair and concentrating fiercely on the warm and vital living weight of him, his deep and slow breathing, the steady beat of his heart.  The strange melancholy loneliness didn’t leave him, but it finally drew back enough that he dared to close his eyes and risk sleep again. He dreamed again, and uneasily, but only of darkness, and it was no more difficult to bear than any other ill portent he’d ever dreamed.

When morning came, he’d all but forgotten the dream. He remembered waking in the night and the sudden sense of crushing insignificance, but not what had brought either about.

And he soon had more pressing matters to worry about, for although they had indeed come to a low dip in the spine of the mountain, they must needs go over rather than under as Roland had, and the way would be demanding indeed.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We finally earn that explicit rating in this one! Additionally, we have Alain tripping off some 'shrooms (for only very serious psychic purposes, of course) and some dire prophecy. Enjoy!

And now look, as if from the vantage point of a circling bird: two men, two tiny ant-figures struggling up the side of the mountain. They’d come a long way north and the slope was indeed gentler; to their right the peaks rose ever higher, marching in a jagged line towards the southern horizon. Where Roland had been forced to go under, they were able to go over.

But gentler did not mean gentle, and easier did not mean easy. Soon enough they left behind the greenery and abundant - if small - game of the foothills and were among a cold world of grey and glittering rock. The air grew thin in their laboring lungs. The sun glared down, close enough it seemed they could almost reach up and touch it, and beat on their heads and threw up dazzling reflections off the bare stone until they were aching and half-blinded. The path grew narrow as it wound ever more steeply upward. At times they were forced to double back, losing hours of time.

And when they reached the apogee of their climb and stood at the rooftop of the world, what did they see? To one side the truly fearsome peaks which made the ones they had so labored to ascend look like the gentle rolling hills of a meadow. And to the other, at the bottom of a dizzying drop-off, there rose a great carpet of ancient forest.

And now as they descended it was this they angled towards, though not quite straight on. They came out in the strip of rocky, grassy land between the forest and the foothills which some distance further on terminated abruptly at the edge of the great western sea. And it is there that we join them again.

\---

Exactly when the foothills of the mountain became rolling lowland was difficult to pinpoint. By the time they stopped, though, Cuthbert was willing to say they’d reached it.

They stood atop a modest swell of hill and looked out west, where the sun had not yet touched the horizon but was lowering steadily towards it. Everywhere but behind them the land flattened out and farther out.

But more than that, the air itself told Cuthbert they were truly in another kind of place. It was  _ wet _ , with a salty bite to it that could only be the sea. Even in the green belt between the desert and mountains proper, where water had been plentiful, the air had still had that dusty dry undertone. And up among the jagged peaks it had been dry and  _ cold _ .

Cuthbert raised his face to the cool salt breeze and closed his eyes, savoring. Every pore in his body seemed to open up to drink in the moisture.

“This seems as good a place as any to stop,” Alain said.

“You don’t wish to see if we can reach the sea? It’s close.” Though he couldn’t hear the waves, he could hear the seabirds calling and even see a few of them wheeling in the sky. 

“I’ve no wish to go stumbling through all this at night.”

That, Cuthbert had to admit, was a good point. They’d come out into a rocky sort of meadow, where stones poked out of the thin soil, hidden - unlike in the desert they’d just crossed mostly by moonlight - well in the dry yellow grass. In places it looked to grow higher than Cuthbert’s knees, and no doubt hid ankle-breaking holes as well as stones.

So it was they settled in on top of their hill. Cuthbert left the gathering of fuel and making of the fire to Alain and went off into the night in search of fresh meat for their dinner, and he was not disappointed. He flushed up a pair of ground birds that resembled pheasants, bagged them handily, and brought them back.

One he tossed to Alain to pluck, and the other he sat with to take care of himself.

“It would be handy,” he remarked as his fingers deftly pulled feathers, “if these fellows came bald. Perhaps it’s a defense against being so delicious, that it’s such a hassle to get them undressed. Easier to get a maiden aunt out of her drawers, I’d say!”

Normally such a comment would have earned him an arched brow and a dry inquiry as to how many maiden aunts he’d divested of their virtue of late, or at least a roll of the eyes. Alain only grunted and kept on plucking, staring vaguely into the fire.

Cuthbert, who had learned much of patience over the years, let him alone for a time. To fill the silence he hummed to himself, a jaunty little song about plucking blackbirds for a pie that his mother had sung to him as a boy.

The image of her face swam before his mind’s eye. As always, there came pain with the recollection, though by now it was a worn and toothless thing. Gilead was naught but dust and ruins, had been naught but dust and ruins for centuries, and his mother’s bones were but more dust with it, hers and his father’s too.

What this evening - looking down from high ground at the rolling yellow grass, the wet air heavy with sea brine, the moon a bright sliver in the dark sky above - reminded him of most was the time they’d spent in Mejis.

Likely the momentary reappearance of the man Sheb in their lives had put his mind on the topic. It rambled now from memory to memory, but kept returning to one specific image: riding out one night with Alain (but not Roland, because Roland had been with his woman, and even so many years later and knowing how it all ended, some small part of Cuthbert felt every bit of his fifteen year old self’s bitterness) just because they could, because they were young and farther from home than they’d ever been and the late summer air had that strange new sea smell to it; riding out all the way to the edge of a cliff overlooking the water and gazing out together across that endless dark expanse of water, the rolling boom of the surf thundering in their ears.

The sight of the ocean had given him that same awed understanding of his own tininess as the desert sky. He’d reached for Alain’s hand, for something else warm and human and alive. He’d turned and seen Alain looking at him and been sure that Alain wanted to kiss him, was  _ going  _ to, and that he’d welcome it.

Cuthbert had been the one to do it first, not so long after that, but he’d known all the same that Alain was thinking about it that night.

The memory was at once melancholy and sweet. He’d never felt quite the same way, pulled between the understanding of his own insignificance before such a vast and alien thing as the endless open churning sea which stretched out and ate the horizon, and at the same time so intensely aware of his own body, so  _ present _ inside the borders of his own skin, that he felt somehow as huge inside himself as the world around him did.

They hadn’t known what was going to happen then. He’d been angry at Roland and jealous - not of him but  _ for _ him - and had no idea that in a couple of short months he’d simply be terrified for him. That in a couple of short months, the Roland he’d grown up with wouldn’t, strictly speaking, exist anymore.

“Where is he?” he asked suddenly. 

Whether he’d been following Cuthbert’s thoughts or simply figured there was only one man he’d be asking after like that, Alain didn’t bother asking who Cuthbert meant. “I’m not sure.”

“Not sure? What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

Alain pushed his closed fist against his right temple, grimacing like a man in pain. Cuthbert recognized this expression as the one he made when he couldn’t figure or explain a thing as well as he thought he ought to. 

“I don’t… I can feel him, but he’s… not far away but, I don’t know…  _ dim _ . More like I’m seeing where he was or where he’s going to be than where he is. He’s not  _ here _ .”

“What,” Cuthbert asked doubtfully, “is he still getting across the mountains?”

“No,” Alain answered at once, with confidence. “He got across before we did. I just don’t feel him the way I should be. I’m not sure what it means.”

But the look on his face suggested it meant nothing good.

\---

“He’s near the sea,” Alain told him when they rose the next morning. He said it with a doubtful twist to his mouth and a distracted, inward look in his eyes, but he seemed sure enough at the least that it was the sea they needed to head towards, and not the forest that rose up in the other direction.

So they headed west, into the sea breeze. The going was as treacherous as Alain had suggested last night, though as they went on the land flattened out and the grass got shorter.

The end of that day didn’t quite see them to the sea. Slightly before noon the next day, though, the land came to an abrupt and crumbling end, and the sea began.

Cuthbert looked down the beach, which stretched out grey and rocky and singularly uninviting for as far as he could see, and then looked over at Alain.

“So how far down are we walking?”

Alain could only shrug. 

\---

It turned out to be two weeks, or perhaps three. The days blurred together after a time. 

They walked along the beach, up close to the rising foothills so it was easier to find clean water. At night they ate of the eerily chattering lobster creatures that came swarming out of the waves. 

The beach continued on, so long and unchanging it seemed it must gird the whole world.

Finally, they came to a place that looked no different to Cuthbert than any other part of the rocky, dreary strand. Alain stopped, however, and closed his eyes for a good long time, and then went stumping gamely off up into the foothills.

Here it was much steeper than where they’d come down. Craning his head to look at the jagged mountain peaks rising above, Cuthbert wondered how Roland had ever managed to get across. He surely had - Alain said so - but from their vantage point such a crossing looked suicidally impossible.

“Have you picked up the scent?” he asked Alain.

“I think so. I don’t know. Let me think.” Alain waved him off.

Cuthbert hung back, not saying anything but ready should Alain stumble or take a fall. Alain led them all over the hills beside the area of beach he’d picked out, and though he had a deep well of patience, it grew dry as the day lengthened towards night.

“I don’t understand,” he said finally, kicking savagely at a rock and sending it sailing off into the evening shadows. “He’s  _ here _ , Bert, I feel him - it’s like I’m standing right on top of him, but he’s a shadow.”

Not wanting to, half out of fear speaking it might make it true, Cuthbert asked, “He isn’t dead, is he? ‘Tisn’t his shade vexing you so?”

“I don’t think so.” Alain did not look reassured by that line of questioning. “I’ve never felt anything like this before.” He stood where he was, frowning at the ground, then seemed to reach a decision. “I need to look deeper.”

What that meant was laying down a great fire - he very particularly arranged the grass and branches before setting them alight, and not in any manner Cuthbert recognized - and then taking a handful of dried mushrooms from his purse, grinding them up carefully between two stones, and steeping them into a tea with a truly astounding smell. Even when Cuthbert moved prudently upwind, it followed him.

“I’ve used these before,” he told Cuthbert calmly while he waited for his foul brew to be ready, “but not for a long time, and not prepared quite like this. So I’m not completely sure how it’ll take me. It will take me some hours to come back to myself, and I may speak without knowing, though it likely won’t make much sense. Try to remember anything I say anyway, because some of it might be important.”

“So far this is sounding like quite the normal evening for me,” Cuthbert said. He eyed the cup Alain filled quite askance. It was hardly the first time he’d seen Alain use drugs to enhance his spiritual sense, nor would it be the last, but this stuff smelled more poisonous than most of his concoctions did. “You’re sure that’s not a cup of deathcaps you’ve boiled yourself up there?”

“Positive,” Alain assured him with a hint of a smile.  

He knocked the cup back in one long draught, throat working as he swallowed. When he lowered it, the look on his face suggested it tasted worse than it smelled. How such a thing could be possible, Cuthbert didn’t want to contemplate.

A few minutes after finishing the cup, Alain stood, walked a short distance from their fire, and - as calmly as one could do such a thing - vomited into the sand. Cuthbert half-rose, alarmed, but without looking back Alain waved him off. 

He stood crouched over for a few more moments, dry heaving once or twice, then spat, scuffed sand over the mess, and came back. He rinsed his mouth out first with a cupful of salt water from the sea, then with water from his canteen, brackish but clean and fresh.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “that’s perfectly normal. It’s foul stuff, it is, and upsets the stomach. Better brewed with spice tea and honey, but, well…” He shrugged. The world had moved on, taking such delights as honey whenever one wanted with it.

\---

After that, it didn’t take long. The skin of his legs began to crawl, as if an invisible army of ants were marching up his body. The sensation moved slowly up to the top of his head and then beyond, and his awareness of himself went with it. He was still trapped within the boundaries of his own body and mind, but he was aware that he existed outside of them as well, and that soon he’d be able to stretch into those parts.

“I believe,” he told Cuthbert, every word tripping slowly off his tongue into the evening air, “that Roland may be outside of our time in some way. There are other worlds than these, you know this -”

“Aye,” said Cuthbert.

“ -and some of them exist within ours, or halfway in ours and halfway out, or -” with an effort he stopped himself and waved the words away, his hand trailing light in the gathering darkness. To discuss such concepts with Cuthbert - who possessed a quick and clever mind, if not the touch which allowed a more intuitive understanding of such ideas - would be fascinating, but he didn’t mean to be sidetracked. 

“The point is that I believe Roland may be somehow out of true with time or space as we know it, but not quite all the way in another world. I don’t think I’d be able to feel him at all if he were.”

The fire had begun to ripple and thrum as if it were a living, breathing thing. And was it not? What was fire if not life distilled down to its most potent essence, to the consuming heat and light at the center of all that lived? Was not a man simply a fire burning inside a body, burning out the brain and heart and joints until the body finally fell away?

“So this is to expand your awareness with the touch, then,” Cuthbert said. 

Alain felt a flash of love for him, a physical wave of feeling that flowed up from his stomach and through his chest. Clever Cuthbert, who looked and saw and understood so much. Through the shifting flames Alain saw him surrounded by breathing golden light and knew it to be the color of his soul, and how brightly it burned! How powerful was the fire roaring inside of Cuthbert Allgood, even after all these long hard years! 

With a great effort he tore his eyes away from Cuthbert’s shining face and looked back into the dancing fire. Easy enough to trance himself with flames on a normal night; with the mushrooms working on his mind, expanding it, he fell almost immediately into a drowsy state of altered awareness.

Now he could hear the world speak around him, in the hollow coughing thunder of the waves and the grit and rustle of the sand - and all the things inside the sand, under it, the little crawling burrowing things - and the sighing of the wind and even the mournful sing-song of the lobster things asking their plaintive questions to the stars. 

All the sounds wrapped around each other and surrounded him, suffused themselves all through him, so he heard them not with his ears but in his very bones, in the tidal flow of blood inside his veins. He understood that the ocean he sat in front of was the same as the ocean inside of himself, that he and Cuthbert both held worlds upon worlds inside of themselves.

He looked up, to see the beach and sky and sea all flowing into each other. The stars glittering in the sky were reflected in the dark mirror of the sea, and he became sure it was more than just a mirror, that they were held between two vast stretches of the cosmos, sheltered on only this tiny strand of rocky beach. That they might fall off and go floating out forever into the void of the stars seemed not only possible but plausible, even certain. How long could they stay hanging on here while that void pulled at them in both directions?

He took a deep breath - exquisitely aware of the smell of the air, the brine and rotting kelp and fishy scent of the lobster things, the chilly pre-autumnal bite and the dry rocky scent of the mountains - and closed his eyes, reaching for his center.

Such flights of fancy were a common side effect of the drugs that expanded spiritual awareness. He knew this. He’d experienced it before, to greater or lesser degrees. He drew his mind away from that thought - not denying but simply allowing it to be as it would be and circling around it - and tried to settle simply on feeling, rather than thinking.

The beach, the sea, the mountains looming behind - he felt all these things. The sand shifting under him, the heat of the fire, the grass and salt-dried wood from which they’d built the fire - Cuthbert, sitting across from him, so bright and hot and golden - the cold white stars glittering out in the cosmic void, so unimaginably far away - he slid deeper through the skin of reality and felt the great black hollows beneath the mountain, those ancient graves, the twisted pinpricks of mutant life still hanging grimly on in the depths - deeper and further, reeling through the profusion of life even in this barren place, the tiny things for which he had no names swimming through the spaces in between the matter of which everything was composed -

Finally he flowed out of himself entirely and could look upon all the worlds that touched at this point. He saw them as stacked panes of glass, one atop the other, untold hundreds of thousands of lives barely touching and never meeting and never aware of each other.

He reached for them to sort through, to find the one where Roland was. He could feel Roland very well now, so close he could almost touch him.

He rose from his place by the fire and walked into the foothills once more, prodding carefully at the ground before him with his stick. It was full dark now, the moon just a narrow hangnail in the sky, and he was fire-blind beside - and the sand and soil kept flowing across the ground, into sinuous shapes that dissolved as soon as he felt he would understand them. So he tested the ground ahead, not wanting to take a fall and risk the pain disrupting his concentration.

Cuthbert trailed behind. Alain didn’t look around to see him, but he could feel his presence at his back.

He struggled a good way into the foothills, and then stopped in a hollow filled with bones. No natural place - the bones rubbed themselves together, squeaking and whispering of their deaths, of how they’d been lured into this place they couldn’t leave, or else suddenly set upon. They sent up a rustling and ill wind, and Alain did not want to approach the place, much less step into it, but he knew it was where he needed to be.

Standing there, he saw Roland finally catch up to the man they’d chased across so many years. He saw the two sit down and saw their palaver, and heard much of it, though most of it left his head as soon as it had gone in. One fact he did fix in his mind to tell to Cuthbert, but it was what he saw and felt that was more important.

(And though he didn’t know it, he wept as he watched this talk, for he saw what Roland didn’t and understood what Roland couldn’t.

“He’ll make it,” he moaned in a voice like the grave itself, “he’ll make it all the way to the top like he has every time before and it will do him no more good than it ever has. Better he cries off, better he dies on the way. Death, but not for him! O, Discordia, never for him!”)

Cuthbert grabbed his shoulder, startling him out of the trance into which he’d fallen. Bert’s face was pale in the dark, both eyes pits of shadow, and he looked frightened. 

All of a sudden Alain became aware that the angle at which Bert looked at him was all wrong. Rather than standing, he was sitting down on the ground, the bones of a thousand victims whispering and crackling beneath him. His shirt and face were wet, and when he looked down there was a great dark stain spreading on his front.

“Al,” Cuthbert asked, “are you alright?”

Alain couldn’t speak just then. He managed an inarticulate questioning noise - what had happened, where was he, why was he sitting down on this evil ground, why was he bleeding?

“Your nose began to bleed,” Cuthbert told him anxiously as he hauled him to his feet and helped him step over the lip of the golgotha and head back down the hill. “Then you started shaking and you sort of fell - I helped you sit down - and you were weeping and you said something -”

By then the tears had dried on Alain’s face and he’d forgotten the monstrous thing he’d realized, for there was plenty else to worry him.

“He’s there,” he told Cuthbert as urgently as he could. “He’s there in the stars, he’s out amongst everything - no.” That wasn’t right, although it was true. It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. “He’s there where we just were, in that awful place - a demon place, I think. Or perhaps the ground is simply sour, as such places sometimes are.”

“Is that what’s caught him, then? Some old demon?”

“No, there is no demon. Not anymore, if ever there was one. It’s simply him and Marten -”

“Marten!” Cuthbert cried, thunderstruck. “Marten  _ Broadcloak _ , do you mean? The old court magician?”

Alain had to pause for a moment. As soon as he’d seen it he’d understood that he’d always known it, that it had always been true, and now he had to struggle to recall that Cuthbert hadn’t seen what he had. Though it felt like it was surely blaring out of his mind loud as any warhorn, Cuthbert - touchblind and sober - hadn’t seen nor heard a bit of it.

“Aye, the very same. He’s the man in black. Or rather, I suppose I should say that the man in black once wore the face of Marten Broadcloak.” Long had he suspected as much, in truth. He’d felt Marten Broadcloak plenty of times before the fall of Gilead, when he’d been Steven Deschain’s magician and advisor, felt the immense weight of years on him, felt the cellar-stink of his soul. The man in black whom they’d chased had felt much the same.

He’d never spoken such out loud though, because he hadn’t ever been  _ sure _ , and to say such a thing to his companions - to Roland, whose own mother Marten had witched - in error would be unforgivable.

“Marten Broadcloak,” Cuthbert repeated. “I never would have thought - he always was a queer old fellow, but I never suspected him of being a true sorcerer. Not of this caliber. And Roland’s with him, you say?” A note of concern crept into his voice. “Has Marten put him under some glammer then?”

“I know not if it was Marten’s doing, though I suspect so.” It was hard, now, to gather his thoughts and speak of such important matters. The delicate line where the horizon met the sea, miles out, was of equal fascination to him as the question of what to do about their dinh. Moreover, it seemed absolute foolishness to try to  _ do  _ anything. They were such small things, the two of them, grains of sand on a cosmic beach, and they could no more put their shoulders to the wheel of fate and skip it out of its tracks than could a pair of ants.

“Nor do I know,” he continued, dreamily, “that it’s a glammer, exactly, so much as a pocket where Marten’s stashed him until he’s done with him. I know not how long he intends to keep the two of them there, nor what we ought to do about it, nor what we even can.”

“It does me good to hear you speak so decisively,” Cuthbert said, his tone dry but his expression worried. “Let me clean your face up, and then let us sleep and speak on it tomorrow, when you’re more clearheaded and we’ve both had a night to think on it.”

That sounded like a fine idea indeed to Alain.

\---

Time had gone away, suspending him in an endless rolling moment. The fire burned down to a comfortable glow, more light than warmth now, and the moon moved across the sky, but to Alain it seemed as if these things simply were and always had been. The concerns of earlier flowed away as well, though he could feel them still at the back of his mind, being worked over busily by his undermind.

His overmind had other things to concern itself with.

He drew Cuthbert to him and kissed him, one hand cupping his left cheek, thumb tracing the ridge of his empty eyesocket. Under his smooth skin the bones of his face were buckled and bent out of true on that side, and Alain ran the pad of his thumb tenderly over and over those places, committing the feel of them to memory, picturing as he did Cuthbert’s battered skull.

While they shared breath he ran his other hand down the front of Cuthbert’s shirt, feeling with equal pleasure the tight weave of the fabric and the warm firmness of Cuthbert’s chest and belly beneath it. He reached for the ties at the throat of it, pulling one-handed at them until Cuthbert - laughing, and Alain could taste it in his mouth, silvery and beautiful and sweet - batted his hand away and untied them himself. Then Alain slipped a hand into his shirt and touched his bare skin, felt the thudding beat of his heart and the warmth of his blood and the heat that wasn’t blood or skin or heart but simply the fire of life inside him, burning and burning.

“It seems these mushrooms have raised more than just your touch,” Cuthbert murmured, and reached between his legs to give him a squeeze. “Now I have to wonder what you’ve been getting up to with your training, Al, you and a bunch of ancient mystics going around drugged and randy - seems the sort of thing I might have liked to see.”

“It isn’t that,” Alain said, though he couldn’t have said exactly what it was. 

It wasn’t lust he felt, exactly, but more a deep sensuality, or the immense lushness of his own senses. Every inch of him had grown another thousand nerves, and everything he felt and smelled and heard and tasted kept dancing over into other senses, so that the moonlight fell cool on his tongue and the sea brine in the breeze ticked in his ears and Cuthbert’s pulse beat in his own hands, his own mouth. He felt the barriers between himself and the rest of the world growing thin, felt himself becoming part of everything else, and he wanted to feel as one with Cuthbert as well.

“No,” Cuthbert said, voice muffled because his mouth was on Alain’s neck and moving down his chest, though Alain couldn’t have said when he took his shirt off, “you needn’t lie to me, I’ll keep your secrets. Just tell me though, have you met any  _ comely _ ancient mystics? Or perhaps taken instruction from any lovely maiden seers?”

Alain reached up and ran his fingers through Cuthbert’s hair; it flowed across his hands like living ink, so dark and smooth and fine. “You know I haven’t any interest in lovely maidens, seers or otherwise.”

“No,” Cuthbert agreed, “but I’ve an interest in imagining it, and did it ever hurt anyone for a man to dream?” 

He pushed Alain back, gently, though the journey from sitting to lying flat in the sand seemed to take a small eternity and happened not with any flowing grace but instead as a series of still moments all stitched together. Alain lay with his eyes half open, gazing up at the sky and watching as color pulsed and flowed between the stars, marveling at the profusion of sand beneath him - it seemed as though he could feel every grain - and almost entirely lost track of what was going on until, suddenly, Cuthbert’s mouth engulfed him.

Propping himself slowly up on his elbows, he looked down the length of his own body. Cuthbert grinned back up at him from between his legs and lapped at the head of his cock, his clever tongue tracing the shape of it while Alain watched.

Alain lay back down and closed his eyes, letting the sensations wash over him. He slid easily into Cuthbert’s mind and his senses doubled, so that he felt the wet heat of Cuthbert’s mouth and the limber movements of his devilishly talented tongue and at the same time felt the weight and stretch of his own cock in Cuthbert’s mouth, tasted skin and salt, felt Cuthbert’s pleasure at giving him pleasure and his own magnified by how well he could feel that Cuthbert enjoyed doing this -

A timeless stretch later, he reached out and curled his fingers in Cuthbert’s hair and pulled his head up, not roughly but not gently either (and shivered with the thrill of heat that shot to the pit of Bert’s belly at being so handled.)

“Stop,” he said, his voice rough and foreign in his own ears, drawn a long way up the dry well of his throat. “Come up here. I want you -”  _ I want to have you _ , he meant to say,  _ I want to be in you _ , but Cuthbert came flowing up his body to straddle him before he could, and looked down on him, hands on his shoulders and knees around his hips.

“You have me,” he said, and bent to kiss him. “However you want me,” he said against Alain’s mouth, and reached between them to take hold of Alain’s cock and lower himself onto him. 

A low pleased moan sighed out of him as he did so, and Alain drank in the noise and echoed it back, pleased beyond what any words could express at the way Cuthbert’s body took him in, how hot and wet and ready he always was, how it felt to be drawn into that - never  _ tight _ always open and welcoming but  _ gripping _ , like they were made to fit into each other - heat.

They rocked together, slow and unhurried. There was no pain. Alain could feel it waiting for him, burning a sullen ugly red down in his ruined knee and his hip and up under his left arm, where a bullet had dug out a bone-deep trough in his flesh and splintered his ribs and sometimes when the pain was bad he couldn’t lift that hand above his shoulder but it had almost taken him right through the heart, so he counted himself lucky, and the pain was lurking there and waiting for him but right at that moment it was gone, and all he felt was slick heat and sweetness and the unspeakable euphoria of joining, mind and body, with the man he loved.

He slid his hand between Cuthbert’s legs to rub at him so that they might come together. Cuthbert did first, chanting Alain’s name against his throat, and it was the way he squirmed and shuddered and the way his insides squeezed and spasmed that brought Alain off as well, the way he could feel Cuthbert’s  _ pulse _ inside of him, beating wild and hard in the extremity of his pleasure.

_ This is the act that birthed the world. _ They said it had come spilling out of Gan’s navel, but this was the truth of it: the union of their bodies, the union of their minds, the oceans in their bodies rushing and spilling out into each other and mingling together, becoming one thing, one new thing composed of both of them. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we get some world-building, because it's way more entertaining to figure out how queer people fit into your fun new fantasy world - especially when you have a medievalesque focus on dynastics and borderline ancestor-worship, like we get with the gunslingers - than to just sort of quietly pretend they don't exist. Enjoy!

Alain's stomach woke him shortly after sunrise. He opened his eyes, realized he was going to vomit, and rolled onto his side just in time to avoid doing it all over himself.

Moving set off a slow, colorful explosion of pain in his head. His skull was stuffed full of rocks which rattled about knocking chips off the inside of it. When he cautiously turned his head, the bones of his neck grated.  The pain in his head was so bad he couldn’t hardly open his eyes. It throbbed behind his face, bringing the nausea back. He put his hands over his face and breathed slowly until it subsided enough for him to notice anything else.

That was when he realized that he was, unaccountably, half naked. Sand stuck in a gritty layer to his back. The rest of his body ached as well, though none of it could hold a candle to the monstrous squeezing pain in his head. His knee and hip came close, howling of how he’d over-used them last night.

“Good morning!” Beside him Cuthbert sat up - fully clothed, Alain noticed, though with his shirt untucked and untied - and stretched, yawning, then climbed to his feet with enviable limberness.

“God, no,” Alain groaned. Bert’s cheery voice sent hot splinters flashing through his skull. Another fit of nausea seized him. This time nothing came up, for he’d not eaten since lunch the previous day, and well emptied himself by that point.

Bert came to crouch beside him and hold his hair back out of his face. “Poor old fellow,” he crooned, sounding not nearly as sympathetic as Alain thought he ought to, “you really can’t be going all night like that at your age, you know.”

“Shut up,” Alain groaned, and put his head down, staring at the grainy vee of beach between his legs until the fit passed. “Where is my shirt?” Luckily the sun hadn’t been up long enough to burn him, but he still  _ itched _ all over.

“Just a moment.” Cuthbert gave his hair one more stroke and then left. 

Alain kept his gaze fixed downwards, not wanting to contend with the constant motion of the tide yet. Presently his shirt was dropped in a lump in his lap, and Cuthbert’s hands were back on him, briskly brushing the sand off his back and shoulders.

“There you are!” Cuthbert thumped him on the back.

Making their way back down the beach was hellish. Alain staggered gamely along with his eyes squinted nearly shut, relying mostly on his stick to keep him upright and out of a hole. As unpleasant as it was to get going, he had no desire to stay by their campsite. Something about it felt simply  _ bad, _ though he knew not what.

Memories of the previous night came trickling back in as he walked. He recalled making love, which at least explained why he’d awoken without a shirt on - though not why Bert had let him go to sleep in such a state - though those memories were so fragmented and confused he wasn’t entirely sure who he remembered doing it  _ as _ .

Why his shirt was covered with blood he couldn’t begin to recall.

Clearer was his recollection of the bowl of bones, and the scene he’d witnessed between Marten and Roland. And that brought to mind their dilemma of what exactly to do about that -

“Al?” Cuthbert asked, without any of his earlier cheeriness. “Are you feeling any better?”

He felt like his knee and hip were full of ground glass and his guts full of snakes, but that was hardly new. Worse was his head, which throbbed furiously in time with his pulse, but that wasn’t new either. “Well enough to talk.”

“You said something last night - you told me to remember if you said anything of note, and this seemed passing odd -” a pause, and then, in a fair imitation of Alain’s voice - “He’ll make it, he’ll make it all the way to the top like he has every time before and it will do him no more good than it ever has. Better he cries off, better he dies on the way. Death, but not for him! O, Discordia, never for him!”

Alain shuddered, every hair on his arms standing up straight. Hearing that awful, grieving version of his own voice coming out of Cuthbert’s mouth made his blood run cold.

“I said that? Those words exactly?” Though he knew by the way Cuthbert had said it - mimicking rather than simply recalling - that it was exactly what he’d said, down to the cadence. 

“To the word. You were weeping. Your nose began to bleed and you had some sort of fit, and then you sat down on the ground weeping and said that.” Cuthbert looked as troubled as Alain felt. “You don’t recall what you were speaking of?”

He almost could. It hung just beyond his reach, like a word that refused to come off the tip of the tongue. “I don’t,” he had to say finally. “I should, but I don’t.” 

He didn’t like that he’d apparently fallen down in a swoon or started bleeding, though he tried not to let his nervousness show. Such was not uncommon when one overexerted oneself with the touch, but what he’d done last night shouldn’t have been that strenuous.  He liked even less that he couldn’t remember it. Whatever might have driven him to invoking the Discordia - which referred both to those blighted lands over which the Crimson King ruled, as well as the forces of the Red which served him, opposed ever to the White - had to be dire indeed. To have  _ forgotten _ it - !

“It sounded as if you might have been speaking of Roland,” Cuthbert said cautiously. “Perhaps of his quest for the Tower.”

“I might have.” 

It was their quest as well and had been so for time out of mind. Fleeing Hambry in the Barony of Mejis, Roland had spoken to them of the Tower, and though it had been years yet until they’d turned their feet and hearts towards it, it had become their quest then. Yet, in some way they all three knew it was more Roland’s than either of theirs, though surely if he fell they’d carry his guns on to lay at its foot as they sang his name. 

More likely, they both knew but never said - never needed to say - Roland would stride over their fallen bodies on his way to the Tower.

“It makes no sense, though,” Cuthbert said, darting a fretful glance at Alain. “Like he has  _ every time before _ , when we’ve been searching for, oh, how long, with time the way it is? Decades, maybe centuries! And not found hardly a single sign that the damn thing is even real!”

“I know.” But an unpleasant thought was slowly occurring. “I’m not sure it can be done, and I’m not about to start meddling in the stream of time itself, even if I had the least idea of where to begin.”  Had it been Bert with the touch, he might well have said differently. He’d always had more curiosity than good sense, and been willing to take more outrageous risks just to see how they turned out.

“So what are we to do, then? Settle down in some hole and wait for Roland to come out on his own and hope we aren’t doddering old greybeards or a hundred years dead when he does?”

“That,” Alain said, “is exactly what we’re to do.”

\---

It wasn’t a hundred years before they saw Roland Deschain again, but - reckoning by the seasons, which meant little with how strange and soft time had become - only ten.

\---

It wasn’t a hole they settled into, either, but a shallow cave back in the grassy stretch between the forest and the beach.

It stretched back for fifteen or twenty feet or so, and was composed of two wider circular chambers connected by a narrow passageway. The larger of the two, at the back, was nearly fifteen feet from wall to wall. At its lowest, the ceiling almost brushed the top of Cuthbert’s head, but once they got through that narrower entryway and into the wider chambers, he had a half foot of clearance.

Alain, nearly half a foot shorter, was a good deal more comfortable - in that dimension, at least. He was considerably stouter than Cuthbert, and had to go sideways through the narrowest part of the stone hallway.

“Well,” Cuthbert said, standing with his hands on his hips in the center of the chamber, “this seems a likely place. Too short for me and too narrow for you, what more could we ask for? My father did always tell me a good marriage took compromise, but I never thought that meant being equally miserable.”

“We can widen the passageway out,” Alain said mildly.

“Yes, or grease you up whenever you need to come in or out! Or perhaps simply keep you inside, waiting to please me after a hard day’s work... I must say, I like the sound of that one.” He dropped Alain a slow, deliberate wink. That was the trouble with having one eye, it made it damned hard to differentiate a flirtatious wink from a regular, run of the mill blink.

He cast his gaze once more around the chamber. “It is the best we’ve found,” he admitted. “And not in a bad place, either.”

A creek ran down the hill just a few feet away, and it was close enough to the beach to make hunting the lobster things easy. The forest was a good trip away, but close enough to gather wood and greens.

It was awfully far from the place where Roland was - or would be - but Cuthbert saw the sense in that easily enough. Between the mountains and the sea there was only the rocky beach and stony foothills, neither suited for any length of habitation. A body needed greens to live, not to mention something other than lobster to eat every once in a while, not to mention shelter from the weather.

“It’s good,” Alain agreed, “and we can easily make it better. This will do for a start, and we can build out from the front of the cave here a bit -” 

And on he went, sketching out how the place would take shape. A homey shape, Cuthbert had to admit. Alain had always had a sense for such things - ‘twas he who’d arranged for the furnishing of their apartments after they’d been married. He’d spoken of little else in the months leading up to the ceremony, though possibly only because the idea of the wedding itself scared him so. Cuthbert had fully expected him to faint during.

How long had it been since he’d thought of that time? They’d been so young. The castle had stood as sturdy and impregnable as it had for the last thousand years and they’d had no idea of the fate barrelling towards them like a bullet from a gun, no idea at all. Even the growing tide of war had seemed far away and unimportant compared to their own giddy, self-absorbed happiness.

Thinking of it hurt - a physical ache like he’d been hit in the solar plexus - but it was an old and familiar ache, at least, and preferable to the new uncertainty about Roland’s fate. Alain had said he didn’t know when Roland might come back out into their time again. Maybe tomorrow, he’d said, maybe a hundred years from now.

(Maybe never, he hadn’t said, but Cuthbert had seen the unspoken words in his eyes and the set of his mouth. Maybe never, maybe this was as far as it went, maybe this was the end of the quest.)

The way he spoke, though, of building a whole cabin around the mouth of the cave, didn’t suggest he thought it would be anytime soon. It would be better to plan too far ahead than not far enough, better to keep busy for however long it was - but Cuthbert rather thought it was going to be a good long while.

Cuthbert could no more keep his mind from dwelling on that which he found unpleasant than he could pluck the stars out of the sky, but he could at the least distract himself, and so he threw himself wholeheartedly into the planning.

\---

They hiked out into the forest first, to see the lay of the land. It was an ancient place, the trees mostly huge and well-rooted and not to be moved without serious axe-work. Luckily, Alain kept a small hand-axe, which they’d found handy plenty often before, and with it they could tackle the saplings and deadfall and get what they needed.

They hauled wood back - bum leg or no, Alain was prodigiously strong and could carry damn near his own weight in lumber, provided it was strapped to his back and he had a hand free to lean on his stick with - for eight days.

For another week after that they rested and cut their haul into usable lengths. Some of it went for planks, some for struts, some for poles. They ate mostly of the things which Cuthbert had taken to calling Curious Shrimp - when Alain had pointed out they were far too large to be shrimp and bore hardly any resemblance, Cuthbert had grinned fit to split his face and said, “That’s what’s so curious about them!” - and, slowly, assembled the shape of the initial outbuilding that went around the mouth of the cave.

“I wish,” Cuthbert said wistfully as they were putting up that outbuilding, “that we still had Tommy around. We’d be living in seaside cottages with heated floors, tile roofs, and running water by spring if that old boy were here, wouldn’t we?”

Alain had to agree that they probably would be. Thomas Whitman had ever been the poorest among them at gunslinging, with his poorly stitched together body and his gentle, dreamy temperament, but he’d had a singular talent for building things. In a kinder time, he might have lived a long life making things, but he’d been born to the gun, born during the time of the world moving on, and he’d followed that bloody path to the end of his short life. The members of his ka-tet who had survived him might not have had such practical skills as he did, but they were to a one better at killing, and that seemed to be the sort of skills these rough times required.

Lacking any real degree of woodworking skill, much less nails or hammers or saws, they couldn’t build solely of wood. Cuthbert’s idea was to make a sort of tent, stretching hides over wooden poles and planks to make a structure that ought to stand up to most weather, provided the area they’d settled in wasn’t prone to hurricanes. This time of year game would still be plentiful, and they both knew how to tan and sew a hide. 

(“Not to mention,” Cuthbert said, “that we can pile some on this beastly hard floor, and perhaps I won’t wake up every time you turn over, thinking the sound of your joints is something exploding.” Which meant that he knew sleeping on the hard, cold stone floor of the cave was a torment for Alain, and wanted to fix it as well as possible.)

The first batch of deer they hunted, skinned, and processed together, one of them working on the skins while the other smoked and salted as much of the meat as was possible. They’d arrived at the end of summer, and every day it seemed the bite of autumn in the air grew stronger.

After that they made a relay of sorts. Cuthbert did most of the traveling back and forth, hauling meat and hides, while Alain worked at building their shelter.

It came together well and quickly. The outer structure was a long triangle only slightly larger than the cave, set with wood framed windows - open to let air through and smoke out in good weather, fitted with heavy leather coverings for bad - in the center of which they dug out a stone-lined cookpit.

The cave floor they covered with hides. Their crude house was dressed in buckskin, but these still had the fur on, the better to add cushion between their bodies and the cold stone. Even that only helped so much. Once they’d gotten the outer structure up and closed the cave off from weather, Alain set his mind and hands on a more ambitious project: a bed.

Without a proper axe, cutting wood into the right shapes and size was difficult. He did the best he could with the little hand-axe, though it had never been designed for such work, and set to carving the finer adjustments with his knife. Slowly, that took shape as well, a low-slung wooden frame fitted with slats to hold a mattress, big enough to sleep three men.

The mattress he stitched together of leather and filled with dried grass. It was a crude thing, no doubt, but piled high with the furs they’d collected it was more comfortable by far than the floor.

“And,” Cuthbert declared the night Alain finished stuffing it and sewn it shut, rustling and fragrant with the smell of grass, “next year I’ll lay you down on a featherbed.”

“Will you?” Alain asked. 

In truth the rough grass-stuffed mattress was more than he’d hoped for - and more than he’d hoped they’d have time to make. Autumn had come and nearly gone, winter was almost upon them, and Roland was still as distant as ever. They had food and shelter and more comfort than they’d had, in truth, for a long time, but he’d have traded it all in that moment to be back on the trail with Roland again.

“I will!” Cuthbert said firmly, and kissed him just as firmly. “You’ll see. But let’s break this one in first, shall we?” 

They did, and for a time neither thought of Roland.

\---

Winter came, putting an end to the chilly, drizzling rains of autumn. Those had proven to be a particular torment to Alain; the damp got into his joints so badly that on the worst days he could barely get out of bed. The drier air of winter was a relief.

It got cold, but not too much so. It snowed, only once deeply enough to worry about. Greens became hard to come by, but they’d smoked and salted plenty of meat, and even if they hadn’t, the Curious Shrimp cared not for the turning of the seasons and came swarming up out of the evening tide regardless.

Each day Alain reached for Roland, and each day found him as dim and distant as ever. At first Cuthbert asked about him nearly as often. It became a sort of ritual, a call-and-respond over dinner:  _ Is he here? / Not yet _ .

Gradually, Cuthbert stopped asking. Gradually, Alain stopped expecting to feel him.

The days passed and piled up, one after another, til they found themselves suddenly on the other side of one month, and then two, and then three, and then the fresh green sprouts of new grass began to grow and storms began to sweep through and spring was there.

\---

Winter had passed by in a drowsy flash. They’d spent most of it inside, with no need to venture out and nothing much to do when they did.

With spring there was more to do. Gathering fresh vegetation, which their bodies had come to crave desperately over the salt meat months of winter, was high on the list. So was hunting to replenish their stores, and fixing up the place they’d both started to think of as home rather than a campsite.

The first of the spring storms came down with squalling ferocity. It ripped one of their hide walls most of the way down and washed out half the hillside on which they’d built, necessitating hasty repairs and the creation of a foundation made from wood planks and stones.

Aside from replenishing their supplies of food - not difficult for the two of them, with the sea so close - their most constant chore was to gather water. With no nails or pitch to make a barrel, they settled on another solution: a good sized young tree, knocked down and torn free of the earth by a storm.  Alain hauled the stump back and they both took turns hollowing it out, until they had a passable vessel to hold a goodly supply of water.

After that Cuthbert became determined to build himself a bath. The nearby stream provided fresh water, and they even had a couple of battered soup pots to heat it up in, but - so he declared - a man got tired of only being able to scrub himself down, shivering bare-assed in the open air. Sometimes, Cuthbert said, a fellow wanted to  _ soak. _

“Well,” Alain - who was perfectly content with the current state of affairs and did not, all in all, mind being a little grubby as badly as Cuthbert did - told him, “I’m not hauling you back another tree to do it in.”

Cuthbert loftily assured him that wasn’t needed, and it turned out not to be. Instead he’d carved himself a wooden shovel and dug out a pit, and after much experimentation found that, by lining it with stones, then a layer of well-greased buckskins, then another layer of carefully selected and very smooth stones, he could achieve a rough sort of bath which held water long enough to soak in.

That was the biggest project of the spring. During his free time, Cuthbert set to fulfilling his promise of a featherbed. Every day he could he bagged a couple of birds, whether gulls or grouse or geese, and spent the night busily plucking them.

Spring was a busy time, but to Alain it felt somehow unreal. He had a sense, ridiculous as it was, of playacting, like they were boys out in the forest, pretending to be woodsmen. (Though usually they’d been woodsmen who, when the vicious dragon threatened their sleepy wooded hamlet, turned out to have once been gunslingers or at least harriers, and saved the day, six-shooters blazing.) At the end of the day he half expected to head home, not back to the cave which they had settled into, but to the ‘prentice barracks to scrub down and change into clean clothes for dinner.

Finally it came to him: the passing days, so full of building and repairing - of making a  _ home  _ \- felt like when they’d first been married.

That had been in spring as well, on the day of first planting. An auspicious time for a marriage, for tradition held that as the crop was planted and grew and in the fullness of time came ready for harvest, so too would the couple in question plant their own seeds and in due time harvest children.

They’d been betrothed a handful of months after coming back from the personally disastrous but publicly lauded mission in Hambry. During that mission was when they’d become first entangled with each other, though it had been a proper mess. Upon returning home, they’d both agreed to start over.

As Roland was drawn further into the thrall of the Grapefruit, the two of them had cloven more tightly to each other. After a few sweet months spent furtively exploring the new mystery of sex together - and how much better they had both understood Roland’s preoccupation of the months before, then! - they’d gone to their fathers to lay the idea out.

Such a thing wasn’t exactly unknown in Gilead, though theirs was an unusual case. Love between men was common enough, especially men of the gun, who naturally enough formed closer bonds with each other than most ever would with the wives their fathers picked for them. Common enough, but reckoned generally to be a boyish thing. Men, it was understood, grew up and married women and gave them big bellies so their fathers’ names would carry on through the generations. If they happened to have arrangements with each other on the side, well, that was their own business. 

Alain had been old enough to understand his duties in that area. He’d grown to accept the idea, and come to believe that if he were well-matched he could come to like his wife, if not love her - could possibly even come to love her, if not desire her - and be able do his duty in the marriage bed and get himself an heir. He regarded it not with the nervy eagerness of most of his fellow ‘prentices, but with the same sort of resignation that he faced down classroom assignments with. He would not like it nor take naturally to it, but it was expected of him, and he would do it.

Then Cuthbert had told him, in that carefully offhand tone he had which meant he was quite bothered but didn’t wish to say so, that his own parents had begun to bring up the subject of courting with him. He’d simply offered commiseration then, but a few days later it had occurred to him that there was a solution to his problem.

A solution, in fact, to both of their problems, for Cuthbert had one too.

Cuthbert’s issue wasn’t quite the same. An incorrigible flirt even at fifteen, he had no issue with desiring women. He desired everyone about equally, and wasn’t shy about it.

However, a man like Cuthbert Allgood couldn’t marry a woman if he wanted an heir. Not unless he found one like himself, which Alain supposed must be a common enough arrangement. Men like Cuthbert - and women, as well - weren’t unknown at all, though they couldn’t be said to happen often.

_ Ka-ki’shume _ was the term Vannay had taught them. It meant, literally, a break between the spirit and the body - he’d taught them of the three bodily boxes, the last and lowest being the ki’box from which came the low functions, such as shitting or fucking or plain old yellowgut meanness. Dry and soft-spoken Vannay hadn’t used such words with his young pupils, of course, but the concept had come across just fine.

More poetically, he’d told them, it meant a difference between soul and flesh, between the truth of who a person knew themselves to be and what their body declared. Always ready to seize on a good object lesson, Vannay had been, and that must have been a rare one. That Cuthbert might not have wished to provide such a lesson only occurred to Alain much later. Growing up, he would have said it simply wasn’t anything anyone made much note of, and not until later did he realize how much effort Cuthbert must have put into making sure it was so.

Such a thing was recognized, and there were forms and ceremonies to follow for changing the way a child was legally recognized. By the time he’d turned six and been taken to the ‘prentice barracks to begin training, Cuthbert Allgood had been granted a boy’s name and recognized by lay and by law as his father’s son, allowed to follow the way of the gun… and marry a woman, when he grew older.

The lines of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers went back all the way to Arthur Eld’s first gunslingers, and to be the one who let the line die out was unthinkable. Worse than unthinkable. Had he died or been sent west, Alain supposed one of his two sisters would have been recognized as the heir, and her firstborn son would have received his grandfather’s guns. Cuthbert, however, had no siblings.

Men didn’t normally  _ marry  _ each other. Alain, who had pored laboriously over books on the subject looking for precedent, had found that the language of the traditional marriage contract did not just imply but outright stated the obligation to have children. A marriage could be annulled, a spouse put aside, or a gilly legally recognized and rendered capable of producing legitimate heirs if no issue came of the marriage. (And had that not, in fact, been part of the cause of all the trouble they’d run into in Hambry? It surely had.)

Men normally either simply lived together as bachelors, or married women to produce heirs while still carrying on with each other. However, when Alain had brought the idea up to Cuthbert, he’d seen their loophole at once: their marriage could produce issue.

With all the thoughtless confidence of boys not even sixteen years old, they’d breezily decided they could have two children, one Allgood and one Johns.

“Perhaps even four,” Cuthbert had mused with an almost greedy gleam in his eye, “a boy and a girl for each. Wouldn’t that be a treat?” The idea had plainly held a fascination for him, one Alain hadn’t suspected but shared.

And so they’d brought the idea before their fathers, who had brought in their mothers and all four conferred among themselves. In due time they’d agreed - looking back, Alain had to wonder how much that was motivated by the sure knowledge that they’d carry on as they had the last few months regardless of the answer, and better to plan ahead than have them wed in haste and hope no one felt like counting months too closely when the child was born - and the two of them had been betrothed.

And then married, a long year later which somehow still passed in a flash. 

They’d had only a few months before the fall of Gilead, before it ceased to matter to anyone but them, but during those few months the both of them had gone about in a disbelieving daze. 

Could they really have gone, in twelve short months, from their parents’ children to gunslingers and men wed, with their own household and their own suite of apartments in the castle? 

Were those rooms really theirs? Was that bed theirs, a huge curtained thing big enough to fit five or six men? Were they truly expected now to get a child in it - a far cry from a year ago, when Alain’s father had pulled him aside and said he was glad his son had finally figured out how to be a man, but he’d feel a lot more than the flat of his father’s hand if he was careless enough to plant a bastard in Robert’s boy’s belly?

(And they’d tried at that, as diligently as any two newlyweds could be expected to. That their efforts had produced no living issue was something that, looking back, Alain had to believe was a blessing. What, after all, would their ragged troupe of exiles have done with a baby? Still, it was a bitter thing as well, and he knew Bert felt the same.)

Each day had felt like a more elaborate form of the play-pretend they’d done as boys. The strangeness might have worn off in a few more months or perhaps a year. It would have become simply normal, simply part of their lives. However, before that could happen, the city had fallen, and they’d been cast out into the world to wander. Then it hadn’t mattered at all what they’d been to each other in lost Gilead, not to anyone else.

Their apartments on the third floor of the castle’s east wing had been far grander, but that was what it felt like to Alain as they turned the cave they’d settled in into a passable home. 

This time there was none of that dazed newlywed glee or strangeness, no difficulty comprehending their new station in life. There was just the simple contentment of making a home together, and as spring bloomed into summer and summer faded into autumn, it stopped feeling like playtime and began to feel like a second chance at a peace Alain had never thought to have.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cuthbert has a bear-related mishap and makes a questionable decision.

Cuthbert laid patiently beneath a screen of bushes, eye fixed on the deer. It was a handsome buck with a magnificent rack of antlers, and Cuthbert’s interest in him was threefold. One of their walls needed replacing, and this fellow’s hide would do a fine job; he’d clearly eaten well this summer, and his meat would last them a good long while; finally, the huntsman in him couldn’t help but imagining that rack fixed above his door as a trophy.

The day had started off fine and bright, with crisply cool air balanced out by the warmth of the shining sun. Clouds had rolled in since then, and though it was still early afternoon, the forest had gone dim and grey. A light, misting drizzle had started falling, and was threatening to become a proper rain at any moment.

Still, Cuthbert waited. 

He’d been out four days hunting and had unusually bad luck, and didn’t want to return with nothing but the tickling cough he’d developed two days in. Most of that time had been rainy and cold, so he’d hoped the fine weather might draw out some prey, and here this fellow had come, wandering right into his sight…

It had been the work of long and frustrating months to re-learn how to aim with only one eye, after Jericho Hill. He was still a better shot than any normal man, but a gunslinger was no normal man. He could almost  _ hear _ Cort bawling in his ear that he didn’t deserve to hold a peashooter, much less his father’s guns.

It wasn’t his gun he held now - though both were strapped securely to his hips - but his trusty slingshot, that old companion of so many years.Try as he might to retrieve his steel shot after he fired it, some balls simply went astray, so soon enough he’d be down to slinging rocks with it, but bullets were even less replaceable. Louder, too.

He waited, barely breathing, for a clear shot. Just a moment more and the buck would be squarely in his sights, and he’d put a ball through its head and haul it back home and be in out of the damn rain and they’d have fresh venison steaks for dinner…

The buck stopped suddenly, every line of its body screaming tension. Cuthbert did stop breathing, sure he’d somehow been spotted. Just as suddenly, the buck burst into motion, kicking up its heels and fleeing through the underbrush.

Swearing furiously under his breath, Cuthbert shot to his feet. One hand dipped to his waist; too late now for a shot with the sling, but he might still take the buck through the chest with a bullet, or maybe lame it -

There came a great crashing and rustling and grunting from the underbrush. At first Cuthbert thought it must be the buck, though it was coming from the wrong direction.

Then the bushes parted and out lumbered a great brown bear. At once Cuthbert understood the deer’s flight. He shared the urge himself.

The bear was a fat and glossy fellow, obviously well-prepared for his upcoming hibernation. To Cuthbert’s eye he looked about twenty feet tall.

Cold clarity dropped over him. He saw everything as if time had frozen and he could examine every detail as leisurely as he wished. The bear was fifteen feet away. Its glaring brown eyes, huge in its enormous skull, were fixed right on him. He was faster in the short term, but too close to get away. If he ran, it’d catch him up before long. One swipe of a single paw would take his head clear off his shoulders.

He whirled and ran. 

Behind him the bear came running as well, close enough he could hear the bellowing huffs of its breath. He didn’t dare look back to see just how close. 

His goal wasn’t escape - not horizontally, at least. He ran for a tree. Fifty feet away - forty, thirty - the bear roared behind him. He fancied he could feel the wind of its breath, smell the carrion stink.

At least he reached the tree. Not slowing, he leapt, grabbing for the lowest branch. He caught it and swung his legs up, feet still pumping madly.

A paw slammed into his back and knocked all the breath out of him. His shirt tore. Full of adrenaline as he was, he felt no pain, only that sense of awful weight and strength. However badly he might be hurt, it hadn’t been enough to drop him out of the tree or kill him outright, and so it wasn’t important right then.

He swung around on top of the branch and scramble his way higher up into the tree, out of reach of those terrible paws.

The bear stood up below him and roared once more. Cuthbert looked down into its face, drew his gun, and put a bullet in both its eyes, then one between them for good measure.

At first the creature didn’t even know it was dead. It stared up at him from blind sockets, then slowly toppled over. For a long time, Cuthbert stayed where he was, unable to make his fingers let go their death-grip on the branch.

Getting out of the tree was much harder than getting up had been. The pain started to creep in, burning lines of it across his back. The world tilted dizzily around him when he dropped to the ground, and for a moment he feared he’d faint.

Eventually everything stabilized again. Cuthbert stood beside the bear’s corpse, trying to get his mind going. The shocking suddenness of the whole thing seemed to have jolted him badly off track.

“You’re just a young fellow, aren’t you?” he mumbled down at the body. Without the magnifying effect of terror, he could see that while the bear was indeed fine and fat, it wasn’t nearly so tall as he’d imagined. A foot taller than he was, perhaps, but no more than that.

Gradually, it occurred to him that the bear would make a perfectly edible meal itself. Many of them, in fact. Moreover, it would make a fine hide. He kept seeing the image in his head, not of their newly repaired wall, but of Alain sitting on their bed -  _ featherbed! _ his mind insisted giddily, though it wasn’t yet - wrapped in the bear’s gloriously heavy pelt, its empty toothy jaw resting atop his curly head, and nothing else at all on underneath.

He reached back and touched the place that hurt, not surprised when his hand came away wet. The loopy, almost delirious nature of his thoughts was a familiar one to him. It came upon him when he’d been wounded.

How badly, though, was the question. He couldn’t tell. Bad enough he was bleeding, though being able to stand and move meant his spine was still intact and the muscles of his back not torn too badly. If he took the time to rest, though, he was sure he’d stiffen right up.

He went back to where he’d stowed his gunna, and brought out the blanket of his bedroll. That he folded up into a small square and pressed to his back, then tied in place as tightly as he could manage with three lengths of rope, top - middle - bottom. 

The sensible thing would be to simply go home. If he didn’t sleep he could be there in a day’s travel, and he needed help he couldn’t give himself, not with the wound where it was. Already he was stiffening up. Already it was an agony to move or bend or even stand.

The wheels of his thoughts turned very slowly. He looked at the bear, then up in the direction of home. If he hauled it, why, it could take him an entire day or more to get home. It was cold out, but the meat could well have spoiled by then, and he might rip the hide. Still, he didn’t think he could bear skinning it. That much bending and twisting would tear the wounds on his back right open, and surely Alain would curse him all through the afterlife if he died in such a foolish fashion.

So, grimly, he set to making a travois to haul the corpse on. He built the bottom as thick as he could to keep the corpse off the ground and spare the hide, but even that effort had him reeling after a short time. Sweat drenched him, stinging in his wounds, and from time to time the world went grey and wavery and far away. His breath rasped in his throat, fast and unsteady.

Eventually he had something he thought would do. With a titanic effort, he rolled the bear’s corpse onto it, took up the handles, and began to stagger his way home.

\---

The trip between the forest and their home usually took them two days together. Cuthbert could do it faster on his own, since he walked faster. 

It took a full day and half another one, this time. The bulky thing he was carrying slowed him up, as did the monstrous pain squeezing him around the middle. Had he dropped the Thing - it had ceased very shortly into the trip to be a hide and instead simply become a weight which he felt in some vague way was attached to him and perhaps always would be - it would have gone quicker, but he didn’t.

Nor did he stop. Exhaustion weighed on him almost as heavily as The Thing did, but he had an idea that if he stopped and laid down, he wouldn’t get back up again. So he marched grimly on, The Thing dragging behind him, and only found his way through the rocky, buckled terrain by sheer familiarity. His feet knew where to step, even when it was too dark for his eye to see much.

He mumbled and muttered to himself as he walked, mostly unaware he was doing it. Sometimes he spoke to The Thing. 

For most of the night, Jamie DeCurry walked beside him. He grew quite cross with his quiet old friend, who wouldn’t say so much as a single word nor take even a part of the terrible burden he carried. It was Jamie’s way to be silent, yes, but not unhelpful. No matter how furiously Cuthbert swore at him, though, Jamie only smiled up at him, his pale grey eyes terribly cold. 

Jamie burned away when the sun rose like the sea mist which came creeping up towards their home on cool mornings. When that happened, Cuthbert remembered that he was long dead. He’d seen Jamie die. The bullet had been meant for Roland, but far-sighted Jamie had seen the glint off the sniper’s rifle and caught it instead. In his dreams, sometimes, Cuthbert still saw the moment - over and over again - when Jamie’s beautiful, curly head exploded into a spray of gore. Roland had borne - still bore - three dented little scars above his left brow where he’d dug out chips of Jamie’s skull.  
  
The vision frightened him quite badly. He thought of Jamie’s eyes sitting corpse-cold and dead grey above his smiling mouth and was very sure he must be dying. Still, it didn’t stop him talking to himself.

The sound of his voice kept away the silence. In the silence all he heard was the increasingly rough rasp of his own breathing and the hectic hammering of his heart. Better to speak to dead men than listen to that.

When their home finally came into view, his weary heart leapt. It played a curious trick on him, though. No matter how long he walked - and that last stretch of time with his goal in sight felt years long - it didn’t seem to get any closer. It kept changing places, too, so that he kept tacking left and right to keep it in view.

Frustration rose in him, hot and sour. To be so close and yet kept from his goal was not to be borne. Tired as he was, hurt as he was, he couldn’t bear it.

Finally he came close enough to see Alain, a stout golden-headed man-shape busy doing something off to the side of the house - digging, Cuthbert saw when he got closer. Digging what?

_ A grave _ , his mind whispered to him.  _ Your grave _ . 

That must have been what seeing Jamie meant. He’d died, maybe on his walk back or maybe in the forest, and he was only a spirit-man now, headed back to haunt the last home he’d known. Alain would see him, at least, but he’d have to send him on sooner or later. The thought of Alain alone out here, maybe for the rest of his natural life, made Cuthbert’s chest ache.

When he got close enough he tried to cry out a hail, but the best he could do was a hoarse and wordless yell which devolved into a fit of coughing. He’d spent the trip breathing shallowly and trying to smother his cough whenever he could. Coughing  _ hurt _ . 

Alain straightened up and looked his way. Cuthbert let go of one handle of the travois to wave, then grabbed it up again. The sudden unbalancing of the weight made him stumble. All of his concentration now went to keeping his footing up the hill to the entrance of their home. It seemed terribly unfair to him that a spirit-man would have weight or feel fatigue. He’d have to ask Alain about it when he got there.

A moment later he looked up, because he heard his own name, and to his surprise saw Alain not just coming but coming at the loping stiff-legged jog that was the best he could do for a run.

“Bert!” Alain called, breathless and distressed. “Bert, by all the gods, what happened?”

“Don’t worry,” Cuthbert assured him, beaming as widely as he could. It was only natural Alain would be troubled to see him coming home in such a state, when they were supposed to be waiting for Roland together, but they’d make do. They always did.

“Don’t  _ worry _ ? You look half-dead, how am I to not worry? What happened? Get inside, come on - what is that you’ve got there?” Alain grabbed at his shoulders, as if to pick him up and haul him in himself.

“I came back to fix myself here,” Cuthbert said by way of explanation. He found that with Alain holding onto him - and how could he grip a spirit? - he couldn’t take one more step, nor lift his arms. “To the house, I’ll fix myself to the house, or mayhap I can haunt you and come along when Ro finally comes back, though I don’t suppose I’ll be of much use with the chores anymore -”

“Oh, plug up your ever-running mouth,” Alain told him fiercely. “You’re not making any sense. How badly are you hurt?” He pried Cuthbert’s hands off the rough handles of the travois, letting it drop onto the ground, then laid one of Cuthbert’s arms over his wide shoulders and put his arm around Cuthbert’s waist and began to hustle him up the hill towards their home, half-dragging him.

The swaying motion of Alain’s uneven walk jostled Cuthbert’s thoughts around as badly as it did his guts. He tried to say his wounds didn’t much matter any longer, but for a time he couldn’t seem to make a word come out, and when he did what he said was, plaintively, “Don’t just leave it behind now, Al, I hauled that damn thing all the way back here for you -”

“And I would have preferred you hauled your foolish self back all the faster instead!” Alain didn’t slow down or so much as glance back at the dropped Thing, laying alone outside the door to their home.

Freed at last from his burden and the need to get home, the last threads of Cuthbert’s awareness frayed quickly.

He recalled the next stretch of time only in fragmented flashes. 

-

Alain stripped him out of his clothes and bundled him face-down into bed to see to his back - that he recalled well, for the endless process of cleaning off the dried blood, then cleaning out the wounds themselves, and then spreading some burning unguent which was no doubt healthy as hell over them and then bandaging him properly back up hurt in a fascinating array of ways. Every time he got used to one kind of pain, it changed. The whole time Alain spoke to him, not saying much but making soothing murmurs and telling him to hush, hush, that it was all right.

-

Some time later he surfaced out of a suffocating riot of unhappy dreams to darkness, his face pressed into some soft thing that muffled his breathing, a vicious weight on his back.

It was the corpse cart, he was sure, the one he’d ended up in after Jericho Hill. He’d been in the middle of it, not on top where they might have seen him breathing or, thank all the gods, at the bottom where he would have been trapped when the whole works was set alight. Right in the middle, sandwiched between the bodies of his fallen comrades.

He was in the corpse cart and the weight on top of him was Thomas, who’d been taken through the thigh with a spear and tripped and set upon by howling blue-faced savages when he’d fallen to the ground. It was Thomas and he knew because in the dim and bloody sunset light that filtered through the bodies atop him, he could see a hand dangling in front of his face with siguls tattooed on the fingers. They meant  _ good luck _ ,  _ good travels _ ,  _ good food _ , and  _ good weather _ . The fingers were mangled and the hand sat on the wrist at an unnatural angle and a runnel of drying blood had turned  _ good travels  _ into nonsense, but he knew whose hand it was.

He looked for Roland - he’d awoken with Roland hissing his name and patting at his mangled face, sending monstrous bolts of pain through his head with every touch, and they’d staggered out together and been off and seen the plume of greasy smoke rising behind them, smelled the sickening pork smell of roasting bodies, and known how barely they’d escaped that - sometimes he dreamt that Roland left him there, sometimes he dreamt that he was in the cart and when they lit the fire he heard everyone else screaming - but he couldn’t see Roland. He couldn’t see anything. 

He couldn’t breathe, either. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t manage. At first he didn’t even know which way he was facing, and when he realized he was laid out flat on his front, panic flashed through him. With a great effort of will, he managed to roll himself over onto his side, though it hurt monstrously. It hurt like he was being sawn in half. That thought made him lift his arms - he could do that much at least - and pat himself down frantically, sure at any moment he’d feel the ragged bleeding edge of his torn belly and plunge his hands into a slimy knot of his own spilled guts, the way he’d stuck his hands into the gaping opened stinking belly of one of his dead fellows in order to heave Thomas’s corpse off.

He was whole, though wrapped with bandages. He drew in a frantic whistling breath and let it out in a series of whooping coughs which made his chest burn and sent agony clawing through his back.

Beside him, a dark form sat up. “Bert?” came Alain’s voice, bleary with sleep, and all at once he remembered where he was, that it had been years and years since that awful afternoon.

“I can’t move,” he whispered into the dark, too frightened to care how little-boy desperate his voice sounded.

“Your back was all torn,” Alain told him, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. “You can move, your spine wasn’t damaged, but your muscles were torn and you shouldn’t sit up.”

“I can’t -” He started coughing again. When it was finally over his head pounded with the beat of his heart. “Feels like. Something. On my chest. Heavy.”

“You caught a fever.” And though Alain was trying to sound soothing and as if nothing were wrong, there was a note of worry in his voice. “Your chest is wet. You just need to rest, alright? You’ll be perfectly well if you just rest.”

Cuthbert wasn’t at all sure of that, but exhaustion swept him back under. 

-

Next time he surfaced there was a fire burning in the front of their home, casting its warmth and light back into the cave. Sunlight and fresh air came in, too - the roof must have been off to let in the day and out the smoke.

Alain sat on one of the low benches he’d carved, near enough to touch, mending a shirt. He’d always been handier with that than Cuthbert or Roland. His broad hands and thick fingers were so graceful and quick, no matter how incongruous a skinny little needle looked in them.

“The bear,” Cuthbert blurted. He tried to sit up, remembered, and rolled over onto his side to raise himself on an elbow. It still hurt, but not as badly. “The hide.”

“Awake again?” Alain asked, glancing briefly up from his sewing. “Are you lucid?”

“The  _ bear _ ,” he insisted. He did not feel particularly lucid. He felt feverish and dreamy and drifting and stupid. “You didn’t leave it out there to rot, did you? I brought it home -”  _ for you _ , he’d meant to say, because he recalled that image he’d had of Alain dressed in nothing but the bear pelt, looking up at him with that inviting arch to his brows, though right then he cared little for his own ceaselessly randy imagination and more that his effort hadn’t been wasted.

He started coughing again instead, hard enough it made his vision swim, hard enough that finally he gagged up a stunning quantity of slimy froth.

Alain set the shirt he’d been mending aside and fetched a rag, then crouched awkwardly, right leg stretched stiffly out to the side, to wipe the mess off the floor. Some of it, Cuthbert noted uneasily, looked pinkish.

“Sorry,” he said weakly.

“It’s alright.” Mess taken care of - and what other bodily messes he’d been quietly taking care of this whole time, Cuthbert was glad he couldn’t remember - Alain went back to his seat and his sewing. “Better out than in. As for your bear -” He held the shirt up, and Cuthbert saw it was the one he’d been wearing when he’d met the bear. Alain had washed the blood out as best he could, but the back of it was still stained, and the great jagged rents in it made Cuthbert’s stomach turn. Looking at those, he could all too easily imagine what his back looked like.

“He made quite a mess out of you, didn’t he? You’ll have to tell me how you managed this one when you’re better. I didn’t let him go to waste at all, though.” He pointed at Cuthbert, and said with a hard sort of smile, a vengeful sort of smile, “You’re wearing him right now.”

Cuthbert looked down at himself and saw that it was true. Laying atop him was the bear’s pelt, soft supple leather on one side and thick brown fur on the other.

“Good,” he said, pleased that Alain had understood what he’d wanted, and settled back, closing his eyes. “Good.”

-

His back healed quicker than his lungs did. Soon enough he could sit and stand carefully and with help, and hobble around leaning on Alain’s stick. Getting his muscles used to exercise again after such a long period of inactivity was difficult, and at the end of even an easy day he ached abominably, but that progress was easy to measure. 

The cough and snotty froth in his chest lingered weeks longer. He tired as easily as an old man and lost his breath walking up and down the mild hill that their home was inside of. It would all but go away, no more than a tickle in his throat, and then come galloping back and bring the fever with it, and put him back in bed for days.

All through autumn and most of winter Alain nursed him, feeding him soup and putting poultices on his chest and back and getting him up and walking even when his back screamed and he could barely breathe. And in between those tasks he did most of the work - all the hauling and repairing, shoveling away snow that fell on their roof and blocked their doorway - and never once complained.

And finally, when winter had left and spring thawed out the land and brought on green growth, Cuthbert began to feel truly well again.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just an entire chapter of pure smutty goodness. We've got some prostate play, some tease/denial, overstimulation, anal, oral, the whole works.

Cuthbert had promised Alain a featherbed by winter, and though certain unavoidable delays had made him miss that goal, he took it back up just as soon as possible. In the springtime their meadow was home to great flocks of darting migratory birds, as were the crumbling seaside cliffs.

Diligence brought him to the end of his project, finally, in the late still days of summer, when hot heavy air lay like a blanket over everything and the days had begun once more to shorten. All that was left was the presentation.

He’d solicitously suggested Alain might find a cool bath refreshing after the morning’s work digging another privy pit, and Alain had agreed to that readily enough. Cuthbert had even helped him fetch and dump in the water. Once out there, he knew Alain - for all his earlier protests that the bath was unnecessary - would take the time to soak and probably meditate. 

So Cuthbert put that time to use stuffing the mattress. First he put in a hearty layer of freshly dried grass to replace the old, and then on top of that he added the feathers he’d so carefully gathered over the past year. They plumped the mattress out considerably, and when he laid upon it to test it - well, the resulting creation would never have passed muster back in Gilead, but it was a damn sight more comfortable than before.

Cuthbert let out a contented sigh and lay for a time. Presently, he heard the sound of their front door being drawn back, and leapt to his feet to meet Alain at the entrance to their bedchamber.

Alain came padding in, unselfconsciously naked and without his clothes. Those he’d likely given a dunking and a scrubbing and left out to dry in the sun, if Cuthbert had to guess. He didn’t give them much thought, though, because the sight before him was far more arresting.

No matter how often he saw Alain’s body, he appreciated it all the same. He was always entranced by the sheer solid mass of him, and especially by the way all that mass got to jiggling when he walked.

Up close, there were still droplets of water caught in the coarse blond curls that covered his chest and stomach. Cuthbert reached out and put a hand on Alain’s chest, winding his fingers through the damp hair there.

There were only a scant couple of inches in between them. Alain reached up and set his hand on Cuthbert’s side, above his hip - warm callused palm, thick powerful fingers, resting so delicately against him, though Cuthbert also knew those same hands could easily encircle his narrow waist and move him however Alain saw fit. Gods, but he loved that!

“Do you want something?” Alain asked, looking up at him with an expression that suggested he knew exactly what Cuthbert wanted.

Cuthbert closed the hand on his chest into a fist and tugged him another inch closer, then leaned down to kiss his smiling mouth. “I made you a promise last year,” he said, stepping slightly away. “A featherbed by next winter, I told you. A bold boast, surely, but one I meant to stay by, except, alas! I was made a liar -”

“You were mauled,” Alain put in reasonably.

“Made a liar!” Cuthbert declared, raising his voice. He’d gotten into his stride now and would not be interrupted. “By cruel nature herself, that blowsy bitch! What can a man in that situation do but go on as best he can and fulfill his word to the extent of his ability? I have labored long months for you, dearheart, and now -”

Alain was giving him that fondly indulgent look he reserved for when Cuthbert really got going, the one that said  _ You’re ridiculous, but I love you. _ He was expecting more of a speech, perhaps some outrageous gesture, certainly an exaggerated tale of daring and wits.

What he most certainly was  _ not  _ expecting was for Cuthbert to grab him round the shoulders with one arm, round the backs of his legs with the other one, and sweep him off his feet. 

It happened too fast for him to do anything but fall into Cuthbert’s arms with a startled whoop.

“Bert!” Alain grabbed at him, arms wrapped tight around his neck. “What are you doing, you damn fool? You’re going to drop both of us on the floor -”

“Am not,” Cuthbert said, though in truth he didn’t think he could hold Alain very long. The man was  _ heavy _ . Already his wounded back protested the action. He didn’t need long, though. “It’s my turn now, so hush and enjoy the ride.”

“Your tu -” Alain cut himself off with another alarmed cry as Cuthbert took his first staggering step towards the bed.

It was only a few feet away. Cuthbert crossed the distance easily and bent to drop Alain, mindful of jarring his bad leg too badly. 

Alain fell with a whumpf onto the bed and lay back for a moment, staring up at the rough rock ceiling as if beseeching the gods themselves for words to tell his husband what an empty-headed lackwit he was. Then he raised himself up on his elbows and looked at Cuthbert, indignance and amusement in equal proportions on his face.

Cuthbert stepped up to the edge of the bed, between his splayed legs, and grinned down at him, hands propped on his hips. “You see! I’ve kept my promise, and not cracked either of our skulls.”

“True enough for now,” Alain admitted.

“As for my turn -” he slid a knee up on the bed, beside Alain’s hip, and leaned over him, hands planted on his chest - “you recall our wedding night, don’t you?”

That night it had been Alain - young and strong and whole, then, and more than a little drunk by that point - who’d scooped Cuthbert up in his arms and carried him across the threshold of their new bedchamber, all the way to the bed. Their friends and family had been behind them as well as half the court, cheering and calling out bawdy suggestions as Alain tumbled Cuthbert, breathless and laughing, into their new bed.

And then Alain had put his mouth to Cuthbert’s ear, his breath warm and fast and beery, and whispered with that half-terrified, half-delighted tone he’d had all the long day, “Tell them to go, Bert, or we’ll wake up tomorrow still virgin.”

By that point they’d both had each other just about every way their fevered adolescent minds could come up with, but Cuthbert took his meaning well enough.

“Out, you damned lot of jabbering magpies!” he’d cried good-naturedly over Alain’s shoulder, and hooked a leg around his waist. “We’ve business to attend to, and I don’t need my man fumbling cluelessly about because he’s got an audience! Out, shoo now!”

They’d filtered out into the rest of the suite, to laugh and carouse and drink the night down, and Alain had kissed him gratefully and gotten up to draw the curtains on the bed, and after that…

Cuthbert got his other knee up, straddling Alain now, and leaned in farther, until their noses nearly touched. His hair swept forward and made a dark curtain between them and the rest of the world, though right then that world consisted solely of the two of them.

“I remember,” Alain said softly. He put his hands on Cuthbert’s waist. 

Cuthbert closed the final couple of inches between them and kissed him. Slow at first, soft and slow and unhurried, just savoring the soft press of Alain’s lips against his, but it didn’t stay that way for long. He sucked Alain’s lower lip into his mouth and held it for a moment between his teeth, then let go and met his tongue as it slid forward into his mouth.

They traded breath and soft, wet sounds, open-mouthed and eager now for the tidal dance of tongue and lips, eager now to taste each other. Not desperate, though, not yet, still content to savor the slowly blooming pleasure of it.

This, too, reminded Cuthbert of those old days so long ago. They’d sneak off somewhere and end up just as they were now, Alain on his back and Cuthbert on top of him, and kiss and kiss and kiss for what felt like hours, kiss and clutch at each other as if they wanted to each crawl inside the other. It’d been desperate then, for each time they hadn’t known when the next might be, nor how long they had before someone might happen upon their hiding place.

There’d come a time when neither of them knew quite how to go on even though they both wanted to. Cuthbert could remember vividly how often he’d sat astraddle Alain’s hips and rocked down against him, how sweet it had been to feel the hard outline of him through both their pants, how he’d  _ wanted _ so intensely it made him dizzy, how he’d half hoped Alain would decide to simply take it without Cuthbert having to ask.

( _I don’t want to hurt you_ , he’d said the first time. _Everyone says it hurts the first time for -_ the woman, he’d almost said, but hadn’t - _to be taken,_ _they say you bleed, I don’t want to do that to you._ In Mejis, that had been, and he didn’t like much to think about the two times they’d done it during that trip, for it had been for all the wrong reasons.

They’d worked that one out just fine. It hadn’t hurt and he hadn’t bled and he’d regretted it badly afterwards because he hadn’t loved or even truly wanted Alain, then, but simply wanted to get back at Roland, but when he’d thought back on that moment of fretful boyish concern he’d realized how much he was coming to care for Alain. He’d pined after Roland like a dog all the months they’d spent in Hambry, but he knew in his heart that Roland wouldn’t have corrected himself to spare Cuthbert’s feelings nor cared not to hurt him when he took his virginity.)

He shifted back a bit and rolled his hips down, sighing out a low pleased noise into Alain’s mouth at the way the pressure felt. Alain rocked up into the motion, grip tightening on Cuthbert’s waist, though he wasn’t hard yet.

Back when they were boys, Cuthbert could get him hard with a single touch or word or even just a look, sometimes. Nowadays the forge still had plenty of iron, but took some work to get burning. Cuthbert didn’t mind that at all; Alain might not have been able to get it up as quickly as when they’d been young, but he could  _ keep _ it up longer, aye, and hold his climax off for longer, and if he couldn’t go as often, well, he’d never been shy of using his fingers or mouth the way some men were.

Alain slipped his hands up beneath Cuthbert’s shirt and along his sides, his touch almost light enough to tickle. “I remember,” he said in a low, playful voice, “that I wasn’t the only one naked that night.”

“So you weren’t!” And in truth Cuthbert wanted badly to feel him with nothing but skin between them.

He stole one more lingering kiss and then sat up, pausing a moment to enjoy the view: Alain laid out before him, hands up above his head, buttery blonde hair spread out, face and neck flushed a pretty red that would spread down his shoulders and chest when they really got going, pink nipples standing up stiff and begging to be tweaked and pulled and suckled.

Cuthbert pulled his shirt off over his head and tossed it aside, while Alain reached for and deftly unbuttoned his flies. Then he slipped a hand inside Cuthbert’s jeans, cupping his sex in his palm with his middle finger pressed between the cleft of his lips.

Groaning low in his throat, Cuthbert ground down against the touch. The tip of that pressing finger slid easily inside of him, and Alain rocked his hand with the motion of Cuthbert’s hips, pushing up with the heel of his palm while his finger flexed and bent and slid in and out, teasing at his slick entrance.

Then he pulled his hand free and put his wet finger in his mouth, sucking it clean with an ostentatious pop. Cuthbert made another helpless noise, eye fixed on the sight.

Alain patted his hip briskly. “Come on now,” he said, tone all level and reasonable as if he weren’t a wicked tease, “get those pants off.”

Cuthbert stood quickly on unsteady legs and pushed his pants down. Propped up on his elbows, Alain watched, and this was no mere fond and familiar glance. Cuthbert shivered with delight under the full weight of his blue-eyed regard.

“You know, your mentioning our wedding night has got me thinking…” Alain wrapped his good leg around Cuthbert’s waist, heel pressing into the small of his back.

“Yes?” Cuthbert asked, mouth dry, pulse pounding in his throat and between his legs.

“I want you to fuck me.”

Gods, how Cuthbert loved that! How he treasured those moments where he - and almost he alone, and certainly more often than anyone else - got to hear steadfast, sensible, reserved Alain say things like that! How privileged he felt, even moreso after all their years together, to be allowed to see this side of Alain!

“I’d love to,” he somehow managed to say, though the request had hit him like a fist to the belly. It was something they both enjoyed doing, though the opportunity to hadn’t come along often in their travels.

Alain let his leg drop, and Cuthbert moved away, at once reluctant to leave the close warmth of his lover’s body and shaking eager to get what he needed.

Grease they had aplenty, and nearby. It was always handy, and not just for this. He fetched a cup of it and went hunting for his harness. The longstick itself he kept near enough to hand in the bedchamber, for he often enough had an urge to use it on himself, alone or with Alain watching and pleasuring himself to the sight. The clever collection of slim leather straps and buckles that affixed it to his body, though - that he hadn’t had cause to use since they’d settled here.

Finally he found it, untangled it, and stepped into it. With some amusement he noted he’d grown a bit thicker around the middle since he’d last worn it, and had to let the strap that circled his waist out a bit. The others fit just as snugly as ever though, and when he slipped the stone phallus through the loop at the front it held it as securely as always.

He loved the feel of the base pressed tight to his mound and the unaccustomed weight of it sticking proudly forth in front of him. He looked down at himself, as he always did, and felt the same rush of thrilled arousal to see a cock jutting out from between his legs.

It was a cunningly carved thing, rendered with such lifelike detail as to make the great sculptors weep. And if it wasn’t warm or the color of his flesh, well, Cuthbert had always been gifted with a surfeit of imagination. He reached down and traced the shape of the glans with one fingertip, shivering with how close he came to  _ feeling _ the touch, as if it were truly a part of his own body 

It had been a gift from Alain, a  _ wedding _ gift, and just where and who by Alain had commissioned the thing to be made Cuthbert hadn’t been able to get out of him, though the mental image was surely a treasure.

That night was the first time he’d taken Alain. Oh, there’d been fumbling before, enough to see how much Alain liked it - Cuthbert had used his long, slim fingers to great effect, and a time or two even made use of a wax taper, but that was the first time he’d taken him as a man did, and that well-worn memory had lost none of its savor.

He looked up from his contemplations of the past. Here in the present, Alain sat upright on the bed, watching him, with one hand loosely curled around his cock and slowly stroking.

“Don’t admire yourself too long,” he said, “or might be I’ll have to take care of myself.”

“Oh, I’d never neglect you so,” Cuthbert said, coming back to him, deliciously aware of the bouncing weight of the stone cock strapped to him as he moved.

He bent to kiss Alain, then gently laid him back out across the bed. He trailed wet, sucking, open-mouthed kisses down Alain’s neck, then his chest and belly, sliding down until he knelt on the fur-covered floor between Alain’s legs. 

“A lovely view,” he said, and kissed the soft inside of each round thigh. Then he hefted Alain’s bad leg onto his shoulder, and took the good one by the ankle, pushing it up and back. “Lift this leg up for me, dear.” When he did, Cuthbert sat back to admire the new view and declared in a mystical tone, “Ah, the moon is well and full tonight! This portends -” 

What it portended he didn’t get to say, for Alain knocked his raised foot into the side of his head and told him to hush.

Cuthbert ran a fondly possessive hand down the underside of Alain’s thigh and gave the ample curve of his ass a good squeeze. “Your wish is my command, love.”

With one hand he spread Alain’s cheeks, the better to see his business, while he dipped the other in the cup of warm grease, semi-liquid in the heat of the day. At first he simply rubbed his slick fingertip in slow circles around Alain’s hole, massaging at the tight ring of muscle there until it started to relax.

Carefully, he pressed his finger in, listening for the way Alain’s breath caught. In… and then out, and then in again, slow and shallow at first and gradually going deeper, until the whole length of his finger slid easily in and his knuckles were pressed into the yielding flesh of Alain’s ass.

“It’s been so long, I’d thought to find you tighter than this,” he said, turning his head to nuzzle against the leg propped on his shoulder. “Clearly you recall how it goes, so we’ll have to see if I do as well.” So saying, he pressed his finger in and crooked it, rubbing at the wall of Alain’s insides for that spot, that textured bit that was so good to touch.

“Oh, I believe you d- mmmm...” Alain trailed off in a sudden shivering sigh as Cuthbert found what he was looking for and began to gently rub it with the pad of his finger.

He began to stroke himself more in earnest, in time with the rubbing of Cuthbert’s finger inside him. This Cuthbert allowed for a moment - he loved to watch Alain touch himself, and sometimes all they did was lay in bed together and pleasure themselves together - but then he reached up with his free hand and caught Alain’s wrist.

“Hands behind your head, dear.”

The motion of Alain’s hand stopped, but he didn’t let go immediately. Cuthbert gave his wrist a tug, and finally he removed his hand, presumably to tuck it away under his head as he’d been told.

“You’re a dreadful tease,” Alain told him reproachfully.

“I just don’t want you shooting off early, is all. It  _ has _ been a long time.” And he’d made Alain come with just a single stroking finger before, and not just once, either.

The real reason, though, aside from wanting to draw out the pleasure, was that he wanted to watch the effect his rubbing had on Alain’s cock. It was mostly hard now, thanks to the attention of his hand, fat and flushed with the head just peeking out of his foreskin.

As he kept up his ministrations, it started to twitch and then - and here was the part that made Cuthbert dizzy with lust, that he pictured sometimes when he was diddling himself - to  _ drip _ , fat beads of clear fluid first forming at the slit in the tip and then sliding slowly down his shaft, to smear stickily in his pubic hair or pool in the crease of his hip where his cock came to rest when he laid back like this.

He watched the first welling of fluid go rolling down Alain’s shaft, and then couldn’t help himself from leaning in to lap up the next.

Alain moaned out loud, then said shakily, “You could have said that’s what you wanted.”

Cuthbert took the head of his cock into his mouth and gave it a suck, wriggling the tip of his tongue beneath the foreskin to trace the ridge of the glans, then pulled off, earning another, more desperate moan. 

“It’s not,” he said, licking his lips. “You said you wanted a fuck, love, and that’s what you’re going to get.” Raising himself up enough to look along the length of Alain’s body and meet his eyes, he added with a grin, “If you’re a good boy, I’ll let you come during.” That got him another moan.

Slowly and with generous application of grease, Cuthbert worked in a second finger. He slipped in a third as well, from time to time, just to be sure he worked Alain loose enough - and to revel in the stretch and clench of Alain’s hole around his hand, the way his pulse hammered against his fingers, the way his breath caught in his throat and then came stuttering out - but mostly stuck to just the two.

He stopped rubbing at that spot and simply fucked Alain with his fingers, alternating short and shallow thrusts with long, leisurely strokes, and then went back to rubbing him. Back and forth, back and forth, never letting Alain get too used to any one thing, never letting him get worked up enough to bring things to a premature end.

At first Alain simply shivered and made low, urgent noises in the back of his throat. Soon enough Cuthbert had him squirming, panting like a bellows and moaning with ragged desperation, and then all but writhing, pushing back against Cuthbert’s hand.

He kept on until he heard the first hitching breath, until instead of wordlessly moaning Alain began to call his name - “Bert, oh, Bert,  _ please _ , Bert -” - until every breath out was a tight needy sob.

The first time he’d gone this far he’d been frightened half to death, sure he’d done something wrong and hurt Alain - and when he’d pulled his fingers out and leaned over Al to look at his face and ask if he was alright, Alain had looked at him with tears on his cheeks and such utter desperate bewilderment in his eyes and snapped, “Don’t  _ stop _ , for the love of all the gods, it feels so  _ good _ !” - and now he knew it meant Alain was ready.

Slowly, he slid his fingers out, drawing a keening little sob from Alain. He smeared a handful of grease along the length of his own cock, pushing the base of it into himself and savoring the moment of indirect friction. Then he stood up, groaning a little as his knees popped. 

Alain had one arm thrown across his face, but Cuthbert could see the tear streaks down his face. He could see the way his flushed chest was heaving, too, and heard his deep hitching breaths.

“Al,” he said gently. He hitched Alain’s good leg over his shoulder and slid his hands down, gripping both thighs just below the curve of his ass. “Al, look at me.”

Alain removed his arm, letting his hand flop back onto the bed beside his head, palm up and lax. He met Cuthbert’s gaze squarely, without shame - there was no room for shame between them, not after so long. 

“Please,” he whispered. “Gods, Bert, please, I need it,  _ please _ .”

“Shh -” although he wouldn’t have given up hearing that raw pleading for the world, he still shushed Alain soothingly, even as he lined himself up to push into him - “shh, dear, shh, love, worry not, for I’ve got what you need and I’ll give it to you.”

He pressed in slowly, eye fixed on Alain’s face, watching the way his eyes first rolled up and then closed, the way his mouth trembled and fell open, the way he dropped his head back and clutched at the fur on which he lay. But he didn’t make a sound, not until Cuthbert pulled back out and then slid in again, and then he gave a full-throated sobbing moan.

Cuthbert started slow, long full strokes that slid the whole length of his stone cock in and out and back in again. It  _ had _ been a long time, and he had no desire to hurt Alain and spoil it.

Soon enough Alain had grown accustomed to the length and girth of it inside of him, and wanted more. He bucked against the rhythm of Cuthbert’s thrusts, begging - he was mostly beyond words, but  _ more _ came spilling out of his mouth on every breath -  _ more, more, more _ , a breathless chant that only sped up as Cuthbert did.

“Gods,” Cuthbert panted, “but you’re beautiful.” And he was: spread out on his back, flushed red all the way down his chest, wet-faced and weeping from the sheer overwhelming pleasure of it, chest and round belly heaving with his breath, the hair there soaked with sweat, fat cock flushed almost purple and bouncing wildly between them with every thrust, he was the most gorgeous thing Cuthbert had ever seen.

The sounds of their lovemaking filled the cave chamber. Alain’s cries rose to a pitch just short of screaming, wordless and wanton and needing, and undercutting that sound was the wet slap of flesh on flesh. The noises echoed off the walls and ceiling, doubling and trebling, and Cuthbert was selfishly glad they were there alone, that there was no one else to hear this, that it was his and only his.

He’d fully intended to pull Alain off while he fucked him. The earlier threat not to let him come until after had only been to get a reaction. But he got so absorbed in watching, in the hot driving pleasure of fucking his man until he writhed and wept and couldn’t even manage to call out his name, that before he remembered to reach for Alain’s cock, he came untouched, spurting up his own chest high enough that a string of it hit his chin and went dripping down his neck.

Cuthbert didn’t stop at once, but did slow down, fucking him through it and then rocking into him through the trembling aftershocks, until finally he was still. He leaned over and licked that dribble of semen off his throat, then kissed him. 

Alain moaned weakly into his mouth. He made the same helpless, whimpery noise when Cuthbert slowly pulled out, shuddering all over, but didn’t say a word. It would, Cuthbert judged, be some time until he could.

Cuthbert skimmed the harness down his legs, dropping the whole works on the floor, and crawled into bed beside Alain. He fitted himself snugly against his husband’s body, head on his shoulder, and slid a hand down between his own legs.

What he found was a slick and sticky mess. He’d dripped down his thighs, and he was desperate enough to be touched that everything clenched at the first brush of his fingers.

Later he’d get his own from Alain, and he knew it would be well worth the wait. Right then, he just needed to relieve the tension. So he set to rubbing himself off, pressing firm and fast with a single finger - though not the one he’d just had in Alain - and picturing, in his mind, Alain’s flushed and throbbing hard cock jerking and spurting untouched between them. It took maybe thirty seconds before his own orgasm crashed over him.

“Love you,” he mumbled, pressing a kiss against the edge of Alain’s jaw. All he got in response was a vague groan, but he figured the sentiment was there.

They drowsed together. Time slipped by unnoticed, and all was still save the sounds of their mingled breathing.

Eventually Alain nudged him up into consciousness. 

“C’mere,” he mumbled. Cuthbert leaned up for a kiss, and that was good, slow and deep and sweet, but not what Alain had meant. After, he shook his head. “No, c’mon up here. It’s your turn.” He sounded almost drunk, which was only to be expected after a fuck like that. It took him somewhere, he’d tried to explain once, to some place inside himself where he couldn’t think or speak but only  _ feel _ , and it was so much to feel it overflowed him.

When he put his hand on Cuthbert’s hip and tugged at him, understanding came in a flash. Grinning now, Cuthbert went up on his knees and clambered over Alain’s body, coming to rest this time with his thighs bracketing Alain’s face.

“‘Tis a welcome sight, to see you so.”

“‘Tis a welcome sight in front of me,” Alain said solemnly back, and kissed the inside of one thigh. Cuthbert shivered at the warm press of his lips, the teasing flick of his tongue which gave a promise of what was to come.

Alain stroked his broad palms up Cuthbert’s legs, knees to hips and then back down again, then took him around the backs of the thighs to shift him into a better position. 

“You’ve made a terrible mess of yourself,” he said. As if Cuthbert had any control over it!

“And whose fault is that, hm?” He sniffed haughtily. “I’m only a man, Al, not a statue, to be unaffected by such a sight as you made. No, this mess I lay at your door, and, in fact -” he lowered his voice now to a sultry purr - “that means what you ought to do is clean it up, since ‘twas you who made it. That’s a better use to put your mouth to than jawing at me, too, I wot.”

Alain gave him a long look that spoke eloquently of the injustice of being accused of  _ jawing _ by him, of all people, but then said mildly, “Is that so? Well, I suppose I can’t argue.” And finally he put his mouth where Cuthbert wanted it.

It would not, Cuthbert knew, be fair to speak of teasing, not after what he’d just done. Still, no other word applied so well to the way Alain was licking at him, tracing along his lips and flicking between his folds with just the very tip of his clever tongue.

Squirming did no good at all; he could move a little, but Alain held him too tightly in place for him to grind down against his mouth. He’d just have to take what he was given.

Eventually the teasing tip-of-the-tongue flicks became long, slow licks up the whole length of his slit. Then Alain sucked at his lips, pulling first one and then the other into his mouth with just the lightest, most careful touch of his teeth, and slipped his tongue between them, wriggling it against his entrance.

Cuthbert whined and tried to rock down again, as much from the reflexive need for more friction as for the way it made his belly shiver when he  _ couldn’t  _ because Alain had hold of him and Alain was stronger by far, certainly strong enough to hold him still and helpless in place while he teased him.

“You’re so impatient,” Alain murmured, the wash of his breath maddening against the slick and blood-hot skin of Cuthbert’s sex. 

“You’re trying to kill me,” Cuthbert retorted breathlessly. “It isn’t as if you bear it any better.”

Alain’s only response to that was a disbelieving snort. He did quit teasing, though, and finally got down to it, circling Cuthbert’s clit with slow firm strokes of his tongue. Every so often he suckled at it, pulling off with a wet pop that made Cuthbert throb, or mouthed at it. When he did that, Cuthbert could almost imagine it was his cock sliding between Alain’s soft lips.

He closed his eyes and trembled and imagined it, his cock that would look just like the carven one of stone Alain had gifted him, but hot and hard not in the unyielding way of stone but in that silky smooth and flesh-firm way a cock felt, slim and straight, the same golden brown color of his own skin - he imagined it in Alain’s mouth, Alain looking up at him with those grinning blue eyes while he sucked him, while his tongue flicked and stroked the head of it - Alain with his eyes half shut and his hot mouth open and willing while Cuthbert fucked his face, drooling down the side of his chin, making all sorts of soft wet noises in his throat -

In the very moment before he crested the peak of his oncoming orgasm, Alain - the absolute bastard - pulled away. 

Cuthbert gasped out loud and swore and squirmed to the limits of Alain’s hold on him. For a moment he teetered on the edge and nearly tipped over it untouched, but then the feeling subsided and he was left simply exquisitely, agonizingly close, his whole cunt tight and taut and throbbing with his pulse.

“Alain!” He couldn’t hardly think of anything else to say. The desperate need to climax was all he could focus on. “Alain - Al - oh, you teasing bastard, you cruel man - fuck,  _ please-  _ !”

“In a moment,” came Alain’s steady and wholly unregretful voice from between his legs. “Be patient, dear, you know I won’t torment you long.”

Once, Cuthbert recalled, Alain had tied his hands above his head with a belt and spent most of an afternoon down between his legs, licking and sucking and stroking at him until he thought he might go mad from the sheer desperate pleasure of it. So that promise did not ring very true.

No matter how he cajoled or pleaded or bullied, Alain simply held him in place until the  _ need _ had faded to a dull unfulfilled ache. Then he resumed just as if he’d never stopped.

When he stopped the next time Cuthbert simply wailed, too frustrated for words. By then his legs were weak and trembling and the long muscles of his thighs felt loose and baggy, and it was mostly only the strength of Alain’s arms holding him up.

The third time he fully expected to be denied again, but Alain kept going, tongue flicking rapidly against him. Perversely, though he felt on the very edge of it, he couldn’t seem to come at first; the pleasure just kept peaking and rising, peaking and rising, growing almost unbearable in its intensity, until just when he thought that he could surely take no more the winding tension finally broke and sent him over.

When he came back to himself he was sitting on Alain’s chest, still trembling with the odd throbbing aftershock. He bent to give Alain a woozy kiss - barely met his mouth, mostly just smeared his own slick onto his own face - and then tumbled bonelessly off him to lay at his side.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said I would stick to an update schedule, but I'm going to be honest with you guys: I've got some life stress going on and it makes me feel better to throw chapters of my fic into the void.
> 
> In this one: Alain has a bit of an Episode, and we get some more sexy times. Some masturbation, some fantasizing, some definitely mutually enjoyable somnophilia-adjacent stuff.

There came a point every winter when they were both tired as tired could be of eating smoked meat, salt meat, and what few dried greens were left. It had, after a handful of years, become something of a ritual. The feeling would percolate between the two of them until, finally, one of them spoke up, and then they’d prepare for a lengthy trip out to the beach to catch Curious Shrimp and bag any seabirds that happened to remain. Sometimes they were even lucky enough to dig up some cockles and clams and little crabs as variety.

This year, it came earlier than usual. Partially, that was out of restlessness. There’d been early snow which had kept them both inside for a time, and now that it had cleared up, they were both eager to get out of the cave.

For Alain, that trip had become, increasingly, the only time he left for any length of time. The more time passed, the more stiff and painful his bad leg became, even on good days, while he had to manage his supply of medications ever more carefully. It had been running low when they’d crossed the desert, and now he saved the most potent painkillers for the very worst pain. Every spring and autumn now saw him spending days at a time in bed or in the front chamber beside a fire, trying to drive the damp from his joints.

And while their makeshift home had become quite homey indeed, he didn’t care for what a hermit he was becoming. So he welcomed the chance to get out and feel the bite of the crisp winter air, even though the walk was difficult.

Every year, too, it seemed to take longer. Cuthbert surely noticed, though he never complained nor tried to rush Alain, and quite easily adapted his own quicker pace to his slower companion’s. Even if he didn’t say anything, Alain noticed. It wasn’t to be helped, but he worried about what state he’d be in when Roland finally came back.

That the two of them might be long dead when that happened was one thing. A thing he feared greatly, and a thing that he became more and more certain was sure to happen with every year that passed, but the idea that he might be alive but too crippled to come along was even worse.

Cuthbert nudged him. Though not gifted with the touch, he knew Alain’s mind well, and knew how to read a grim mood on him. “Hush up your melancholy thoughts, my dear. You’re taking all the joy out of our vacation, you are.”

Alain gave him a faint, tight smile. He appreciated the attempt at levity, truly, but even leaning heavily on his sturdy walking stick, traveling so far hurt. “Cry your pardon. I shall think of only joyous things henceforth.”

“You’re a poor liar. You’ll mope and grimace about. Perhaps we ought to cut that leg off you and carve you a wooden one, eh?” A grim bit of humor, but at times the thought had occurred to Alain as well, and not so jokingly either. “I said I missed having old Thomas about, and there’s another thing he would have been good for, eh? A nice stout leg for you to stump about on, he would have made, probably all carven about with flowers and twining vines and such.”

“It would be a sight to see, I’m sure.”

As always, Cuthbert’s willingness to prattle on about nothing at all for as long as he was allowed to helped distract Alain. He let the stream of Cuthbert’s words carry him, drifting a bit out of himself, and stumped along as best he could.

That night, when they stopped, Cuthbert built the fire up to a lovely roaring blaze, then bid Alain lay down on his front. Curious as to his intentions, Alain did so. When Cuthbert knelt over him, though, knees tucked in against his hips, he went up on one elbow, twisting around to try to catch Cuthbert’s eye.

“I’ve no desire for -”

“I know,” Cuthbert interrupted, patting at him soothingly. What he patted was Alain’s rump, though, which did not imbue his words with much conviction. “I’ve no intentions in that direction, either. It’s cold enough your cock would shrivel off if you got it out, and like as not if you tried to put your mouth to me you’d end up with your tongue stuck, and then where would we be? Just hush and let me rub you down, alright?”

Alain hushed and laid back down. Carefully keeping most of his weight on his knees rather than Alain’s sore body, Cuthbert set to rubbing him. He started up at his shoulders, working at the knots which formed there until they let go. He massaged the tension from the base of Alain’s neck and moved slowly on down his back, clever fingers finding every spot where he carried tension and pressing and rubbing until it melted away.

By degrees, Alain found himself relaxing. He kept his mind as blank as he could, not wanting to start fretting about something and tense up again and thereby ruin all of Cuthbert’s hard work. Watching the fire served nicely to keep him distracted. In a state of drowsy near-hypnosis, he was limp and willing beneath Cuthbert’s skilled hands.

When Cuthbert reached his lower back, he couldn’t help the grateful noise that flowed out of him. The stiff way he had to swing his bad leg in order to walk and the way he had to hold his weight meant he was always standing somewhat crooked, and after any time at all it made the muscles low in his back clench up and cramp. He’d grown quite used to the steady throbbing pain of it. When Cuthbert rubbed those knots out of the muscles, he just about moaned in relief.

“You know,” Cuthbert said softly, “I certainly had no randy intentions when I set out, but the way you’re carrying on is going a fair bit towards changing my mind.” So saying, he rocked his hips forward against Alain’s bottom. Gently, he did it, with no real intent behind it, while his hands kept up their blissful work. “Poor fellow, I ought to work you over like this more often.”

“You ought to,” Alain agreed muzzily. At another time, in another place, it might well have led to something else. His mind played an idle fantasy of Cuthbert taking him like this, laid out flat with his legs spread just enough for access, though he wasn’t in any state to act upon it. Just the fantasizing itself was pleasant enough.

Even when Cuthbert’s hands moved lower and began kneading at his ass, it remained simply a fantasy. It wasn’t _just_ his ass, to be fair; it was his hips as well, and he carried a lot of tension there from the way he had to hold his pelvis as he walked or sat. Cuthbert dug his fingers ruthlessly into the ample flesh there, pressing and kneading at the tight muscles until they let go. Slowly, he moved down Alain’s thighs, shifting his own weight farther back and farther back as he went.

When he came, at least, to Alain’s knees, his touch became very tentative indeed. He focused at that point on just the one leg, stroking the tight-drawn skin around his wounded knee with both hands. He did not press, but gently touched and rubbed, doing his best not to jostle. Even that was painful, though it was a better sort of pain than the hot, swollen ache that walking caused. The steady pressure of Cuthbert’s fingers drew his attention away from the grating pain of having made it bear his weight all day.

Eventually, of course, it had to stop. When Cuthbert was finished, Alain felt half-melted. He lay flat out and limp, and for once almost free of pain. His knee still hurt, and his hip ached, but the pain was so distant and small compared to the sense of relaxation he felt. Half-untethered as it was already, his mind slid easily towards Cuthbert, and easily into him. He reveled in Cuthbert’s feeling of deep satisfaction for having made him feel so good, and in the warm spark of arousal curling through his belly. In turn he shared his own feelings, the vast and encompassing sense of softness he felt throughout his body.

Cuthbert lay down beside him, pressed in tight against his side to share his warmth, and idly stroked his back with his fingertips until he fell properly asleep.

\---

The winter wind coming off the sea was bitter indeed. They couldn’t dig through the sand for the smaller creatures which gave their diet some variety for very long, for within a few minutes, any flesh exposed was numb and stiff. Still, they were both in good spirits on the beach. Familiar though the setting was, it felt indeed quite like a vacation. For Alain, who saw this place less often than Cuthbert did, each year brought changes.

Cuthbert made a trip up into the hills to gather wood. As far above the tideline as he could go while still staying on the beach, he laid a fire, which they took turns tending and warming their hands at. It would burn merrily all the day and night, and there they could cook their catch.

During the day, there wasn’t much to do but wander the beach and look for what they might find. Alain had a talent for catching the little crabs which liked to overwinter beneath the sand; he could feel the tiny hot flash of their little lives. He pointed them out, and Cuthbert dug them up. When they had a fair number, they sat down to pop them from their shells and fry them up in grease.

So passed the first afternoon. Once the sun went down beneath the horizon, the Curious Shrimp came out, clucking their endless melancholy questions to the night sky.

Alain could not explain precisely why, but the things revolted him. They were ugly as sin, but that wasn’t it. The sight of them turned his stomach in a way that had nothing to do with physical disgust; it was almost like fear, how they made him feel. Why that should be, when he’d never even come close to being hurt by one, he couldn’t say, but it made him quite wary of them.

After six years, their supply of shells had dwindled considerably, even considering how strictly they rationed their use. And so it was up to Cuthbert to take down the majority of the creatures with his slingshot, armed with round rocks rather than his similarly depleted supply of steel shot. Watching him hunt them, Alain always felt himself waiting, heart in his throat, for the moment one of them caught him unawares. It was dreadfully easy to imagine one of the monsters coming up on his blind side as he went in to claim a kill and handily snipping the tendon of his ankle, dropping him to the sand, where they’d swarm all over him and tear the flesh from his living body before Alain could so much as draw a gun…

It didn’t happen, of course. It never did. Whenever one did come too close up on Cuthbert’s blind side for Alain’s comfort, he called out a warning, and Cuthbert skipped nimbly away from it.

Still, he was glad when Cuthbert decided he’d killed enough of them and came back to him, ams full of fish-reeky corpses.

They passed two days that way, the same as ever. On the third, something quite new happened.

Halfway through the morning that day, Alain began to feel odd. He could not have said why or even exactly how, except that his mind felt increasingly pulled in some other direction. It buzzed restlessly within the confines of his skull, and he kept wandering, only to come suddenly back to himself at a stumble or a nudge from Cuthbert.

Finally, after the fourth such time, Cuthbert asked him, “What’s wrong with you now? You’re drifting off as if you intend to go sailing across the sea.” Fists planted on his hips, frowning deeply, he looked the very image of a scolding mother. Alain couldn’t tell if it was an exaggerated and intentional pose or not. Usually he could feel Cuthbert’s mind quite easily, but that strange thing drawing him to it seemed to fill all the available space, so he could hardly feel Cuthbert at all. And, bereft of the knowledge brought by his touch, Cuthbert’s face and tone were nigh unreadable.

“I’m not sure,” Alain said after a moment. His tongue felt huge and awkward in his mouth. He was horribly aware of his teeth touching each other and touching the insides of his cheeks. His whole body was unwieldy and unbearably heavy. Oh, how he longed to slide into the water and drift along, buoyed up -

Cuthbert caught his arm just as he made to step into the tide. Seafoam rolled over his feet, wetting him halfway up to his knees. The force with which he was pulled back nearly unbalanced him, and there followed a tense moment before Cuthbert helped steady him.

“What in the name of all the gods do you think you’re doing? It’s freezing out, and you’re trying to go for a swim? Come here and sit and tell me what you feel.” So saying, Cuthbert steered him towards the fire. His grip on Alain’s arm was rough almost to the point of hurting.

Unbidden, an image came to Alain of being gripped and hauled about in just such a way by his father when he’d committed some childhood misdeed that called for a strapping. Cuthbert’s long and fine-boned hands were nothing like his father’s own huge, broad ones, so like his own - and Cuthbert was surely not going to bend him over his knee and take his belt to him - not in anger, surely, though they’d done such a thing as sex play a time or two - and surely that was not what Cuthbert meant to do right then either.

The circular, confused nature of his own thoughts distressed Alain. He did not seem to understand what Cuthbert intended by anything he did or said. It was as if they had suddenly begun speaking two entirely separate languages which sounded the same but meant completely different things.

He sat down beside the fire. The air flowed past him like water. He felt at once vast and insignificantly small, afloat in the waters of eternity.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he admitted. Cuthbert crouched before him, staring at him with an intensity that could have meant anything. “I don’t understand you right now. Are you angry with me?”

“No,” said Cuthbert, although he frowned. “I’m worried, is what I am. You’ve come over all strange. It puts me in mind of when you drifted out of yourself in the desert.”

“It isn’t quite like that.” Alain was not sure, however, what it _was_ like. That feeling of vastness kept moving closer, and the closer it came the smaller and more scattered he became, crushed beneath the sheer weight of it.

Very quickly, that sensation grew stronger. It grew and grew, the feeling of being rolled over by some massive boulder, of being buried beneath a landslide, of sinking down to the bottom of the ocean - he could barely breathe for it, could barely move, could not speak at all - and the sound of singing filled his mind, low and sweet and so breathtakingly melancholy that he began to weep as helplessly as a child.

When he looked at Cuthbert, he saw that there were tears rolling down his face as well. “God,” he said in a choked whisper, “is this it? What is that?”

Alain could not speak. He could only point. Out in front of them, far out from the shore, the water swelled unnaturally upwards and then broke around what looked, at first, like an island risen from the depths.

Up and up it rose, and then it turned in the air and went beneath the water once more, and up behind it rose a massive tail which slapped the sea and raised up a wave that came nearly to their fire. Then it was gone.

There were more, though. They breached, snorting out plumes of foam, and then sank back beneath the water with the same ponderous grace that they had risen above it. Soon the waves not only reached their fire, but rose high enough that Cuthbert stood and hastily dragged Alain up to his feet to keep the both of them from being bowled over and swept out. Some distant instinct prompted Alain to grab onto his stick as he was hauled upright, which was the only thing that kept it from being carried away.

The prudent thing, no doubt, would have been to move. Soon enough the waves had doused their fire and wet them both besides. At their zenith, the waves reached Alain’s waist, and the sucking current as they rolled back out threatened to pull him right off his feet, Cuthbert’s grip be damned.

Neither of them could, though. They were fixated on the sight. Whatever the massive creatures were, the immense presence of their minds touched both of them, and they were both enthralled by the age and size and sadness there. They both stood and watched, weeping, unaware of the frigid cold of the water or the danger to themselves, until finally the tide retreated and they could no longer even see the shadows of the creatures beneath the surface of the sea.

Cuthbert, touch-blind, recovered first. He pulled Alain away, up into the hills, and kindled as quick a fire as he could. Everything they owned was soaked, so he stripped himself and then Alain out of their wet pants and laid them both down in the lee of a crevice, so near the flames that they risked being scorched.

The ground beneath them was hard and cold. Cuthbert put his own dry shirt down beneath them to lay on, and unbuttoned Alain’s to crawl inside it with him, laying it over the both of them like a blanket. He’d found a good place, at least, where they were held between the fire and the crumbling walls of the ravine in a pocket of warmth, while the bitter winter wind whistled over the top of their crevice. They huddled close together, skin to skin, sharing body heat.

Gradually Cuthbert’s shivering began to stop. He’d been wetted less. Alain’s did not, however. He kept shivering, and shivering harder, until his whole body was shaking, until it felt his brains would shake themselves right out of his skull, and then all of a sudden his awareness cut abruptly off -

“-lain? Alain? Alain, are you well? Please speak to me, please wake up -”

Something patting at his face. Insistent, almost painful. Alain groaned and tried to turn his head away, but he was held in place. He tried to turn his whole body away, but there was a weight atop his chest preventing him from moving.

He was awakening, and so he must be in their bed, only the last he recalled they’d been on the beach. And their bed had never been so hard or cold, neither. His body was wracked with cold and tightening up in a way that promised agony on the morrow, and still he couldn’t move, and still that voice was calling him, preventing him from sinking back into warm and blissful sleep, and still that hand was patting - almost slapping - at his face -

“What?” he mumbled, although it came out less a word and more a formless moan. Blearily, he opened his eyes and peered about. Before anything else, his eyes light on Cuthbert’s worried face, hanging in the air mere inches above his own. It was Cuthbert atop him, he realized, and Cuthbert patting his face to rouse him. “Bert, _what?”_

“Oh, thank all the spirits,” Cuthbert breathed, although he did not look very thankful. He looked frightened unto death, in fact. “Are you - are you present? Are you well?”

“‘M right here.” He did not feel well. Fog clouded his thoughts, and the more aware he became the more he felt the pangs of his body.

“In your mind, I mean. You were gone for a time, I think. You had - you had some sort of shaking fit, Alain, and scared the life right out of me.” Finally reassured that, at the very least, Alain was not going to pitch over dead right then and there, Cuthbert climbed off of him and helped him to sit up, though he stayed plastered to his side. “What happened? Was it those things?”

“What - oh.” His memory of the last day was coming back, now, in bits and pieces. He recalled the crushingly huge, alien consciousnesses which had rolled right over his own and flattened all the mind out of him for a time. He recalled the great waves which had wet them and sent them fleeing up here into the hills to seek warmth out of the wind so they could dry off without succumbing to the cold. Having a fit, he did not recall, but then one didn’t tend to. It wasn’t the first time, although the last that he knew of had been long ago, and a greater exertion than this, surely.

“What do you mean, _what?”_ snapped Cuthbert. “Are you saying you don’t remember?”

“Mm… no. I remember.” A slow pounding ache began to resonate through his skull. Alain dropped his head onto Cuthbert’s warm and bony shoulder, eyes closed. The dancing light of the fire hurt, even through his eyelids. “I remember now. Don’t fret, please, I’m just fine. It must have been them.” Sitting practically in the fire as they were, his front and legs were uncomfortably hot and streaked with sweat, but his back was cold. He felt no particular desire to move, though.

“What in all the hells _were_ they?”

Alain simply shrugged.

“Well,” said Cuthbert reflectively, “that was sure something. I’d tell my grandchildren about it, had I any.”

His tone was one of near awe. Alain was not sure he felt the same, not at all. That they’d witnessed a singularly amazing event, one they were privileged to have seen, one that in all likelihood no other living men had or would ever lay eyes upon, of that he had no doubt. Still, it had not been pleasant to feel himself so overridden, to feel a mind so vast and so far beyond his own comprehension that it crushed him with the ease with which he’d crush an ant beneath his bootheel, and took all the notice he might take of the ant.

He ached in his heart as well as his body, too. They had been so lonely, so alone. Amazing and wretched all at once, they’d been, for they were the last of their kind, and there would be no more after them.

\---   

Cuthbert could not sleep. He stared up into the pitch darkness of the cave, sweat cooling on his bare skin, and waited patiently for sleep to take him, but it did not come. After a few more minutes, in fact, he began to shiver, and pulled the blanket which he’d kicked off back over himself.

It was autumn, and cooling down but not yet cold. They’d hung hides between the front and back chambers of the cave to further insulate the bedchamber, and so it was always warm, but it could not be said to be hot during this time of year, either. Nonetheless, he’d woken abruptly drenched in sweat and flushed with restless heat, and shortly after he’d bared his skin to the night air, had begun to take a chill, while beside him Alain snored steadily on, asleep and unaware.

It wasn’t anything unusual. Before they’d ever even gotten near enough the Mohaine Desert to think about crossing it, he’d found his sleep increasingly restless, his nights plagued by alternating sweats and chills, and his days by random episodes of feverish heat that stole over him all at once and then slunk slowly away. In recent years it had become much more frequent and his already unpredictable monthly cycles less so, but he’d hardly needed that obvious a change to know what it meant. He mostly welcomed it, for that had been a messiness and an inconvenience - and a pain, say true, though he’d borne up under it without complaint - which he was glad to be soon rid of.

At times like this, though, when he found himself staring down the long and restless hours of the night, it seemed like he’d traded one inconvenience for another.

Sighing, he sat up and climbed carefully over Alain, who barely stirred. Perhaps it was the heaviness in his bladder keeping him awake, and if he relieved that, he’d be able to fall back asleep. He wandered out of the cave, navigating with the ease of years around the furniture even in the utter blackness, and emerged into the chilly autumn air under a cloud-streaked sky. With only the slivered silver moon there to see him, he didn’t bother to put on any clothing. Mother-naked, he padded out some ways from the entrance of the cave and then squatted to relieve himself. Up above, the wispy clouds scudded across the sky, driven by some high wind, and down below the same wind pulled at his hair and raised gooseflesh up on his bare skin, and he did not feel it worth the trouble to go all the way to the most recently dug privy-hole.

The wind whistled mournfully across the scrubby strip of prairie where they’d made their home. There was a heavy, wet smell to the air, and those two things together put quite a melancholy feeling into him.

So empty was the night, so empty was this land - he and Alain might well be the only men who had lain eyes on it for a thousand years, might well be the only ones to do so for a thousand more, and perhaps all Roland would find when he emerged - if he ever did - was their bones. Perhaps Roland was dead as well. Perhaps they had been the last three men in all the world, and once rid of them it could finally finish moving on.

He felt empty as well. If it was his fate to die in this lonely place, he was glad to have had a handful of years to spend with Alain first, but there were things he sorely wished had been different. Years past, he’d come to an understanding that he’d likely never have a child, for all the handful of times he’d kindled had ended in nothing but blood and pain and disappointment. Likely it was due to his nature, to whatever imbalance in his own humors lent him such a naturally mannish body, to being not quite one thing nor t’other. He’d long ago stopped thinking it might happen, but thinking of the change coming upon him put him in mind of the fact that there was now truly no chance it ever could, and somehow that made it seem so much more final.

He wiped himself clean with a handful of grass - and, ah, how he envied his ka-mates their ability to simply shake themselves dry and go on, though once when they were young Alain had quite solemnly assured him that the last drop always went in one’s pants no matter how vigorously one waggled one’s member about, in the tones of a man imparting a great secret - and stood up.

It was too cold to stand about for any length of time. Already his poor bare toes were starting to go stiff and icy-numb. He didn’t wish to go lay back in bed and stare at nothing until morning came, though, with no more company save his own fruitless thoughts of what the past could have been.

Perhaps, he decided on his way back into the cave, if he could rouse and pleasure himself, he would fall back asleep. There’d been a period of years from the time he’d first worked out how to rub himself off during which having an orgasm mostly just made him want another one, but in the last decade or so, it had become an unparalleled soporific. Even if he couldn’t fall properly back asleep, like as not it would improve his mood.

The close bedchamber felt pleasantly warm after the outside chill. He climbed back over Alain’s sleeping bulk and slid gratefully beneath the blanket, wiggling a bit to luxuriate in the feeling of the soft and furry hides beneath his skin.

It took longer to rouse himself now, as well, so he did not get right to it. He lay back, instead, and slowly began to run his fingers up and down the length of his own body, hip to stomach to chest and back down again. Tingling pleasure trailed in the wake of his own slow touches. When he finally put his hands to his breasts to caress his own nipples, they were tight and stiff. He pinched at them, deepening the vague ache of their hardness into a firmer flash of almost-pain, and then tugged. He raised one hand to his mouth, licked his thumb, and rubbed the wetness around one, imagining as he did so that it was someone’s mouth on him, someone’s tongue circling his nipple and flicking gently against it.

His other hand he slid down the length of his body. He combed his fingers through the hair between his legs, but did not get any closer than that; instead he began to stroke at the soft skin of his inner thighs, venturing up to the crease of his groin where his legs joined his body and then away, leaving the place between as yet untouched.

While he got himself going, he rifled through his usual catalogue of fantasies. Oftentimes he thought about things he’d done in the past. Frequently he thought about Alain. Tonight he decided on something vague. No faces, just hands on his body, just folk touching him and playing with him and making him feel good and taking joy in seeing him all spread out and exposed for them, in his reactions -

When at last the throbbing need between his legs reached a point past which he could not ignore it, he reached down there. With one hand he spread his lips apart, imagining the eyes on him, the folk watching who were aroused by the sight of his body. With the other he took his nub between thumb and forefinger and began to carefully stroke it, mindful of the dry friction of his calloused fingertips against the delicate flesh. It was larger than anything he’d seen on any of the women he’d ever lain with, though smaller than any prick he’d ever encountered, and it pleased him at times to take it in hand and touch himself as a man would, pulling the loose skin covering it up and down its length while he imagined that it was a proper cock he was pulling on.

He didn’t get so wet anymore as he once had. With Alain that was never a problem, for Alain was always happy to put his mouth to use - and preferred being fucked, besides, when such could be arranged - but on his own it meant he needed a delicate touch. There was a thrill to walking that narrow edge between friction and discomfort, but as always, eventually it got to the point of simply being uncomfortable. He slid his finger down his slit and pressed inside, but found that although he was now plenty aroused, he wasn’t as wet as he would like. So he lifted his hand to his mouth and sucked on his first two fingers, laving them with his tongue, enjoying the musky taste and smell of his own sex, and then went back to working at himself.

That did the trick. The new slickness of his fingers got his body’s own juices flowing, and when the saliva began to grow tacky and he next slid his fingers down, there was enough there to work with.

He toyed with himself leisurely, mind wandering as he did so. From the fantasy of many nameless groping hands he moved on to imagining the last time he’d taken Alain - face down on the bed, pinned beneath him, squirming and rutting against the furs while Cuthbert rocked against him, barely fucking him so much as pressing himself against the hard base of the longstick - and then to simply thinking of his own body, his own hands on his body, the dual sensations of the taut slick nub beneath his fingers and the calloused fingertips rubbing skillfully at it.

It was good. There was no real urgency, but rather a slow and subtle swelling of pleasure, until he found himself trembling and squirming and biting back the noises he wanted to make while his fingers worked at himself. He hiked one leg up and pressed two fingers into himself, thrusting them shallowly in and out, and tried to decide if he wanted to imagine being fucked - by a man’s cock or a woman’s fingers, either one - or simply focus on the way his cunt clenched around his own fingers.

He found himself increasingly frustrated, though. The pleasure continued to grow, but he felt no sense of nearing a climax. That, too, had begun to happen more and more often of late. Sometimes he simply gave up, but right then he didn’t want to. He had no wish to spend the rest of the night lying there unable to sleep _and_ aching with unfulfilled desire. It always put him in a foul mood, for being unable to climax seemed to make the urge to all that much stronger, and he always found himself damnably fixated on it for hours afterwards.

Perhaps he simply needed a change. No doubt the way his mind kept flitting from thought to thought was part of it. An imaginative fellow, he was, which could work well to his benefit, but it meant he needed something to imagine to truly bring himself off. Sometimes just focusing on the pleasure he brought himself did it, but usually that involved picturing himself as well, imagining himself as if he were a spectator to it.

Perhaps he was too focused on himself. Normally he reveled in his own body, but he wasn’t entirely satisfied with it just then, and no doubt that was seeping in and tainting his pleasure.

He pulled his fingers free of himself and reached over to rest his sticky hand on the curve of Alain’s belly. An idea had come to him, all at once just like all of his best ideas did, and as soon as it did he felt a surge of wet heat down between his legs.

Slowly, tenderly, he ran his fingers down Alain’s stomach and through the coarse curls of his pubic hair, until they found the base of his cock. It lay against his thigh, somewhat swollen but mostly limp, though it stirred when Cuthbert touched it. Keeping his touch as light as he could, he stroked its length and then began to massage the head with his thumb and forefinger, just the way he’d started out touching himself.

In a fit of inspiration, he began to stroke himself the same way again as well with his other hand. He carefully matched the rhythm of each hand, pulling at himself as he rubbed the head of Alain’s cock through his soft and shifting foreskin. When Alain’s cock began to harden under his touch, he was easily able to imagine it was his own he was touching.

He took care to keep his touch light, though he knew Alain wouldn’t mind at all were he to wake up. It was a game between the two of them for Cuthbert to see how long he could touch Alain and how aroused he could get him before he woke. Just touching his cock alone, he could easily make Alain come while still asleep. That had quickly become too easy, and so he’d had to explore other avenues. Putting fingers in him usually woke him up fairly quickly, though once - taking advantage of the fact that Alain had drunk heavily the night before and fallen into a sodden sleep from which an explosion might not have awakened him - Cuthbert had managed to get all the way to sliding his stone cock in before Alain had roused.

The thought of that encounter sent a surge of lust through him. Right then, though, he had no wish to try anything like that. He thought he might well be able to bring himself off just touching Alain.

Once Alain’s cock was suitably hard, he began to gently stroke one fingertip along the sensitive spot just beneath the head of it. When Alain was awake, doing such a thing was a vicious tease, but it was an excellent way to work him up when he was sleeping and couldn’t complain about the slow build of pleasure, nor beg for more. Though he did beg so sweetly…

So involved was Cuthbert in those thoughts that he didn’t notice Alain had woken up until a broad, thick-fingered hand slid across his hip and between his legs. Startled, he half sat up, pulling his hand off Alain’s cock.

“Don’t _stop_ ,” Alain groused. By the thick and mumbling quality of his voice, Cuthbert judged him to be still half-asleep. Fully aware or no, his fingers knew their work. He nudged Cuthbert’s own hand aside and began to rub at him with the ease of long familiarity.

“Of course not.” Cuthbert took him fully in hand, now, and began to pull him properly off. As always, the thick weight of Alain’s hard cock in his hand deeply aroused him. Combined with the skillful way Alain’s warm fingers worked him, it was only a few minutes at most before his orgasm stole over him. Not the intense, gasping, body-shaking sort that he often enjoyed when they made love, no, but a slower shuddering that spread up from his groin and left him feeling warm and sated and - just as he had hoped - sleepy.

In the interests of fairness, he tried to keep working Alain. The motion of his hand kept faltering, though, for he was all of a sudden _very_ tired. Eventually Alain just reached down and pulled his hand away to take care of himself. Cuthbert rolled over to curl into his side, head on his chest, listening to his breathing speed up as he got closer, and fell into sleep almost at once.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is our last chapter! A fairly short one, where Alain has a bit of an incident and then receives, finally, the news they've both been waiting for. And with that we end the interlude and rejoin the stream of the main plot!

“Sleeping in today, thou slugabed?” Cuthbert called as he pulled the doorflap aside and stepped in. “Well, hie thee up and out of bed and in here! I found onions!” He dropped his armful of alliums in an untidy pile against one wall, then gave himself a shake. It worked well for dogs, less so for Cuthbert.

He’d expected to see Alain up and about by the time he returned from his gathering. There was plenty of work to be done - wood to be chopped, water hauled, smoking meat to attend to - but he saw no sign of the other man. He’d figured perhaps the storm had kept Alain inside where he could see instead to endless mending, but he wasn’t anywhere that Cuthbert could see.

Perhaps he  _ was  _ still abed. The previous autumn had been especially wet, the winter not much better, and now spring had come with its constant rains, and certainly Cuthbert had seen it was taking Alain hard this year.

Or maybe it wasn’t his joints at all. Even as a boy he’d suffered from time to time from terrible headaches, and of late they’d come upon him more frequently. Cuthbert could think of half a dozen times in the last handful of years alone.

He stepped into the bedchamber, pausing to let his eyes adjust to the shadowy dimness. If Al were sleeping, well, Cuthbert had an idea or two of how to wake him up, if he were amenable...

“Bert?” came a voice. It was Alain’s voice, he’d know it anywhere, but oddly small and tight, and coming not from the bed but from the far wall.

Cuthbert turned, guts suddenly roiling with bad feeling. When he saw Alain sitting up against the wall, canted to one side, he knew something had happened.

“Are you alright?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be, asking anyway. He went to his knees at Alain’s side, heart in his throat. Up close Alain’s face was drawn and ashen, his eyes bright with pain. 

“Not for the clearing yet,” Alain said faintly, no doubt trying to reassure. “I just need a little help. My hip -” He twitched the fur covering him aside to bare his right side.

Livid bruising mottled him from the hip halfway down to his knee. It wasn’t, initially, so bad as Cuthbert had feared, but the longer he looked the more subtly  _ wrong _ the shape and position of Alain’s leg became. It was rolled out, foot turned outwards, and when he reached out to gently feel the area - praying it wasn’t broken, for he hadn’t the first clue what they’d do about a broken hip - he could feel the ball of Alain’s femur pressing up under his skin, in towards his groin.

Even touching gently made Alain’s breath catch. Cuthbert didn’t like to think of how badly putting it back in the socket would hurt.

“A  _ little help _ ? How in the name of all the gods did you do this, Al?” An ugly thought occurred to him, one he was for the moment too frightened to say aloud: how long had it been? He’d been out since sunrise, enjoying the fresh spring air and grubbing for the onions he’d spied last year out near the forest. How long had Alain spent in this close dark cave, waiting in pain for him to come back?

“It isn’t broken,” Alain said. “Just popped out of the socket, that’s all, and I need help to get it back in. And I haven’t been waiting long.” That was a lie, Cuthbert realized almost at once. He was wearing the bear pelt, which he did often wear as a sort of bedrobe, and he was naked underneath. Alain didn’t tend to be a late sleeper, and he would have dressed after rising from bed - unless something prevented him.

“What  _ happened _ ?” Cuthbert repeated. This wasn’t the first time. One of the bullets he’d taken the night before Jericho Hill had cracked across the socket of his hip, and ever after it had been weak. Years ago his horse had reared up and spilled him, and he’d hit the ground just wrong. How he’d done such a thing alone in a  _ cave _ , however, getting out of bed when their bed was but a few feet off the ground -

“I tripped,” Alain said. “Got out of bed and caught my foot against something.”

A queer certainty stole over Cuthbert that this, too, was a lie. To what purpose, he couldn’t imagine - but it was. It was a perfectly plausible explanation as well, for he couldn’t imagine how else Alain would have taken a fall, but - it wasn’t true. Had he had another fit, perhaps, like the one he’d had on the beach four years ago? If so, Cuthbert couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t say so.

But if Alain had decided not to tell him, pointing out it was a lie wasn’t like to change his mind. Cuthbert found that, looking at that ugly purple bruising and the hint - just a hint, but since he’d felt it he could see it now - of some rounded mass bulging out of his thigh, he didn’t much care how it had happened.

He pulled his belt free and folded it up for Alain to bite down on, and with a pause to take a calming breath, put his hands on Alain.

By necessity, this examination had to be rougher than his earlier tentative touch. As Alain had said, nothing felt broken, and he quickly ascertained the way the ball of the joint had come free of the socket. While he did, Alain bit resolutely down on the leather of his belt, mostly stifling himself.

When Cuthbert pulled the joint back into true, though, no amount of biting down could muffle the hoarse scream that came bursting out from between his clenched teeth.

He sagged against the wall after, head back and eyes closed, sweat sliding down the side of his face. The delicate skin under his eyes looked as bruised as his hip.

Finally he opened his eyes again, breath a little steadier, and reached out to Cuthbert. “Help me up.”

His back was bruised as well, Cuthbert saw when he’d helped him to his feet. More alarming, there was a spot of dried blood crusted in the hair at the back of his head.

Before he could ask about it, Alain asked to be brought his bag. That Cuthbert was glad to do. It clinked and clanked, and when it was finally in his lap Al spent a long time looking through the bottles in there before he selected one and took a swallow. 

Poppy juice, Cuthbert knew. He had several bottles of it, a gift from a man they’d helped years ago, and rationed it carefully, only for the very worst pain.

Cuthbert sat beside him and touched the spot at the back of his head, parting his hair to look. The skin was bruised and split, but not so bad as he feared. “What happened here?”

Clearly it was tender. Alain winced even at the gentle probe of his fingers. “I don’t know. I must have hit my head when I fell. You needn’t worry about it.”

But worry he did. Another thought had occurred to him, brought on by looking so closely at Alain’s head with its mix of buttery blonde and silvery grey hairs, and that was that they were getting  _ old _ . Part of him still felt twenty-four - maybe thirty at most - but they were both, he reckoned, nearing the middle of fifty. 

A strong young man, a  _ gunslinger _ , didn’t fall and dislocate his hip, but such things happened to old men all the time. Was his idea that Al had lied to him true, or was it just that he’d forgotten how old they’d grow? Was it just that he couldn’t, at first, accept or even imagine that the hale and hearty boy he’d married - or even the wounded, crippled man he’d ridden away from Jericho Hill with - was sliding headlong into old age?

He didn’t know, but he didn’t like it either way. Another few years and they wouldn’t be much use to Roland at all - and he realized with a jolt that he hadn’t thought of Roland in - well, how long? 

All winter, maybe all the autumn before that. He didn’t rightly know. All the long years they’d been there, Roland had slowly faded towards the back of his mind, like the memory of how one’s childhood nursery smelled, ready to rise up large as life when recalled but otherwise tucked away.

The greater part of him had quietly come to believe that they’d grow old and die together waiting for Roland. That afternoon’s incident only made him believe that more strongly.

\---

A month later, Alain struggled up out of a breathless dream of pain and fever laid like a lead cloak over him. He shook Cuthbert awake while the pain danced silvery hot up his arm, so real he almost expected to be missing half the hand he grabbed at Bert with.

It was there, of course, and whole. His hip still ached and he could only barely hobble about leaning on his cane, and these days his knee was a constant red agony, but there was yet nothing wrong with his hands.

No, that was Roland’s pain.

Cuthbert sat up at once, squinting blearily around the chamber. “Whuzzit?”

“It’s Roland.” At the sound of their long-gone dinh’s name, Bert perked up and looked around again, as if Roland might have just strolled into their home. “It’s - I dreamt of him. He’s here, back in our time, I mean, or he will be soon, and he’s going to need help.”

“Where?” was all Cuthbert asked.

“Down where I found him the first time. He may travel, I don’t know. He’ll be hurt, I don’t know how badly. You’ll simply have to go down the beach until you meet him.” Alain gave his own right thigh a squeeze, savagely disgusted - as he hadn’t been for years - with the weakness of his own body. “You’d travel faster without me at any rate, but you’ll have to go alone.”

“I’ll bring him back here just as quick as I can,” Cuthbert said. “Will you be alright alone?”

Alain waved away his concern. “I can gimp about well enough with my stick, and we’ve food to last. It’s Roland you ought to turn your fretting to.”

That morning they spent packing, and that afternoon Cuthbert set off, loaded down with food and bandages and fresh water and and a select few of the bottles from Alain’s special bag. And his guns, of course, strapped down to his hips. 

He set off to meet, after ten long years, the man he’d lived his life in service of, and could only pray he wasn’t too late to be of use.


End file.
